BW/4HANA migrations are not a piece of cake. From our campaign on BW/4HANA journey, our consultant Anders Aarkrog touched upon some of the things which was important to be attentive to when starting your BW/4HANA journey.
We would like to give you a visual overview of the steps we take when providing some of our customers assistance with their BW/4HANA migration.
Why should you convert?
1. When you save space you save money
The first one is that when you save space you save money. One part of the BW4/HANA migration proes is the clean up so just imagine all the space you gain by getting rid of solutions, objects and data that are obsolete. There is a substantial amount of money from the IT-department budget that you are able to put to better use.
2. When you save time you save money
One things is money but another is thing is time, which some people might say is the same thing 😉 Once you get rid of all the wasted solutions and data the IT-department is able to perform faster and address the queries from the business better and faster.
Diagnostics & migration
First of all it is important to identify how many objects is supported for tool conversion and how many are supported for manual conversion. This is especially important because it will really determine how much time you have to spend on the migration. One of our customers had a completely cleaned up system, which only had objects that could be converted automatically. Very impressive!
After that’s been determined the process splits into two tracks. The first track is the actual migration track, and second track is the clean up track. Remember you don’t want to waste your time migrating data, that you don’t end up using anyway!
Migration track
1. Toolset
First you have to pick the necessary tools for your migration, whether it is test tools , migration tools or validation tools.
2. Baseline migration run
Here you choose one of two of the solutions, often one that are used the most and within the sandbox system you try to migrate it. You can see it as a sort of practice migration.
3. Operational plan
Once you’ve done your practice migration on one of your solutions, you are able to determine what it will take to do the rest of the migration. This step is very connected to the previous baseline migration run. Because it is through that, you are able to make a plan.
4. Flow-by-flow migration
It is not possible to move the entire system in one go, instead you are doing it in periodical flows.
Clean-up track
You can kind of compare your BW4/HANA migration with moving into a new place. You don’t just have to pack up all the stuff that you need to take with you to the new place, you also have to determine what you don’t need so you don’t end up wasting a bunch of time and effort on bringing useless junk.
1. Clean up of your technical debt
That’s what essentially happens in this step, you determine your technical debt you map out the solutions and parts of the solutions you no longer use.
2. Obsolete Objects
Sometimes maybe the overall solution is still being used and you don’t want to throw it away, but there are objects within that which you don’t use anymore, and guess what? They have to go out.
3. Obsolete Data
The same applies to data, you might still use the individual object, but the data is obsolete, so in danger of repeating ourselves, it has to go OUT!
Get in touch
If you want to get more advice on how to lay out your process for a BW/4HANA migration use the contact form below and get in touch!