Experiences from our 2023 transformation projects

When I look at the past year and our customer projects, there are two points I’d like to make. No two projects were the same, and the experiences in the projects are in line with the statements made by companies in our transformation studies in 2022 and 2023. Every project is unique. Even if the desire for industrialization is certainly great and understandable, a careful decision regarding the goals and the path to be taken in the project is required, especially at the start of a project. This is the only way to ensure that the chosen path leads safely and without detours to the goal.

One piece of good news is that we have once again collected, collated and analyzed the experiences and findings of companies in IT markets worldwide in a large-scale study on the subject of transformation in 2024. We surveyed 1,259 IT decision-makers and transformation managers from 15 countries. This provides us with further valuable insights for future projects, which we should incorporate into the upcoming challenges together.

Noticeable time pressure for transformations

In 2023, it was clearly noticeable that both the complexity of the projects and the time pressure during implementation had increased. Many of our customers have launched programs that provide for a phased conversion of SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA over several years. In our view, 2023 was a year with a significant increase in the intensity of transformations to SAP S/4HANA.

Many of our customers wanted to combine their transformation project with a harmonization or fit-to-standard project at the same time. This meant defining and setting up processes and system settings for the new target platform and, in the end, having the right amount of data from the existing ECC platform migrated to the new SAP S/4HANA system.

Close collaboration with partners

As a data migration specialist, we have implemented many projects together with partners. The interaction between technical consulting and transformation experts was always a success factor for the projects. The boundaries here are certainly not always clear-cut, and the project managers are and were well advised to ensure joint team decisions.

As far as the scope of projects is concerned, we are now recognizing a clear trend towards "hybrid" transformation scenarios. In our experience, the familiar boundaries of color theory from spring-like green to autumnal brown rarely hold up in practice. Even in projects that customers make too green(field) at the planning stage, elements of a selective transformation help to transfer favorite or required histories to the new SAP S/4HANA platform. Conversely, even with very simply planned one-to-one conversions, there are always elements and data that customers decide not to transfer to the new platform after all or that need to be transformed having previously been rejected.

The ONE Data Transformation Approach

We at Natuvion have learnt from the many projects we have worked on with our customers in recent years and are now convinced that only a ONE transformation approach can support all requirements from a single source.

This allows us to use one tool, our Natuvion DCS, to decide very flexibly in which areas of the transformation more or less history is required for the data migration and to implement this from a single source with a central technical platform. We have often found that the requirements for master data, logistics, general ledger accounting, asset accounting and materials management can diverge within a project. In addition, there are requirements from the enterprise architecture.

The year 2023 had every conceivable constellation of SAP S/4HANA transformation projects to offer. With many projects, we and the customers were only able to define the final scope after one or two test runs. In our view, this is perfectly legitimate, as a platform change to SAP S/4HANA should be carefully planned and also provide latitude for adapting the scope. After all, an ERP platform change is a project that usually only takes place in companies every 10 to 20 years.

At the end of 2023, together with our customers and partners, we were able to successfully implement a large number of projects. We would like to expressly thank all those who have traveled this path with Natuvion and have always fought with us for the success of our projects.

As I said at the beginning, I would like to quote statements from the 2023 Transformation Study again. "Looking back, what would you do better?"

• Allow more time for the transformation project (you can't manage a platform change with comprehensive harmonization in twelve months)
• Provide more resources for the project (all project participants need sufficient time for conceptualization and testing as well as trying things out)
• Select and define the transformation scenario well (allow sufficient space for analysis and scoping and then set a clear goal before implementing the project)
  
  

Yours, Roland Storbeck