As SAP®’s 2027 deadline for discontinuing support for its legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other modules approaches, the need to plan and enact the transition to SAP S/4HANA gets more urgent. Missing the transition deadline could have long-lasting ramifications such as additional maintenance costs and less inclusive approaches. By anticipating the chaos and consequences of this forced migration now, businesses will be better prepared to maintain business continuity and de-risk their transition to SAP S/4HANA and other cloud products.
But even those businesses that start the migration process as soon as possible will face significant challenges. In fact, the more well-established and entrenched in SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) the company is, the more challenging the transition becomes. There are many reasons this might be the case, including:
Integrations—Over the years, companies accumulate a growing number of integrations with their SAP systems. Ongoing management of all these integrations can be increasingly difficult and can detract from a company’s ability to properly focus on their migration project.
Complex landscape—Often, organizations have complex system landscapes that may include multiple ERPs, add-ons, non-SAP systems, and custom scripting. If any of the jobs and processes associated with these systems break during migration, business can grind to a halt, costing the company valuable time and money.
No plan for ongoing automation—As organizations mature, they tend to find what works and then rarely deviate from the status quo. This is especially true when it comes to automation in their SAP environments. Organizations update and plan their automation strategies with a focus on continuing to run their automation the way it has always been done. During migration, this lack of forward thinking can lead to a break in automation as the company moves to SAP S/4HANA.
Given the size of the lift required for migration to SAP S/4HANA, there is little time left for those companies that haven’t begun to define their application and workflow orchestration strategy for SAP S/4HANA if they want to avoid any disruption to their business. Migration will ultimately only be successful if workflows run reliably, improve day-to-day work for business users, and support the enterprise’s plans for innovation. Therefore, a modern workflow orchestration platform is key to unlocking the full potential of SAP S/4HANA.
Organizations can’t assume their current workflows will perform at par after the transition because the new environment will likely have new complexities (such as the need for multi-cloud orchestration) that impact workflow performance. Therefore, companies should modernize their orchestration platform concurrently with their SAP S/4HANA migration.
As an SAP-certified solution, Control-M creates and manages SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW, and data archiving jobs, and supports any application in the SAP ecosystem, eliminating time, complexity, and specialized knowledge requirements. It provides out-of-the-box visibility to all workflows across SAP and non-SAP source systems and de-risks the transition to SAP S/4HANA. With Control-M, users can achieve full compliance, security, and governance across business processes, automation, and integration for key tasks during upgrades and migrations to SAP S/4HANA. Both the self-hosted and SaaS versions of Control-M are SAP Certified for Integrations with RISE with SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud.
Control-M provides customers many valuable benefits whether they’re planning out their migration path or they’re in the process of migration to SAP S/4HANA.
Reduced project time and upgrade costs
Control-M is a valuable ally in SAP S/4HANA migration projects, empowering organizations with streamlined workload management, enhanced visibility, automation capabilities, and flexibility to ensure successful and efficient migration journeys. All pre- and post-migration automation with Control-M helps the organization continue smooth business operations, easing the process overall. The SAP S/4HANA migration project costs are expensive and incurred across the organization. Costs include planning time, resource allocation, licenses, strategy, and roadmap development and implementation. The business is the sponsor of these capital projects. If all scoping and planning project deliverables are defined and agreed upon with the steering committee, then complete modernization with Control-M can be done along with the SAP S/4HANA project. The result is a reduction in the number of subsequent upgrade projects, and the savings can be applied to other parts of the business.
Reduced integration complexity
Control-M is designed to seamlessly integrate with contemporary ERP systems like SAP S/4HANA. By modernizing your orchestration platform with Control-M, you can ensure smoother data flows and communication between various systems and applications in your enterprise ecosystem. With proper, accurate planning and defining of all project deliverables and their dependencies, Control-M provides a complete integration view along with the upgrade project.
Complete automation and increased operational efficiency
Control-M offers advanced automation capabilities such as workflow automation, event-driven architecture, and graphical scheduling and monitoring tools, along with analytics through Workflow Insights. By leveraging these automation features alongside your SAP S/4HANA migration, you can streamline business processes, reduce manual effort, and increase operational efficiency. Control-M provides real-time visibility into your enterprise operations, allowing you to monitor and manage processes, transactions, and data flows across your organization. By integrating Control-M with the SAP S/4HANA migration project, you can gain comprehensive insights into your ERP processes and transactions, enabling better decision-making and governance.
Technology stack alignment and scalability
With Control-M, you can align with the IT infrastructure roadmap and ensure that it supports your organization’s growth and expansion and can be easily scaled to leverage new functionalities introduced by SAP S/4HANA. Control-M provides scalability and flexibility options that can be utilized by the business, paving the road for a strong foundation for all business needs and technological advancements. Control-M sets a foundation to start other upgrades or innovation projects and provides a platform and structure where project managers already have that dependency cleared. That way, they can focus on other innovative projects. Control-M serves as a prerequisite for other dependent integration projects, saving the company time and money and expediting other projects that are in the pipeline.
Conclusion
By modernizing your orchestration platform with Control-M during the SAP S/4HANA migration project, you can accelerate the time to value of your digital transformation initiatives. Control-M typically offers pre-built job types, templates, and integration capabilities that facilitate rapid deployment and configuration, enabling you to achieve faster return on investment (ROI) and business outcomes. Control-M (self-hosted and SaaS) are modern workflow orchestration solutions because of their support for hybrid self-hosted and SaaS environments, their ability to orchestrate complex data pipelines and support shift-left user self-service for workflow management, and their DevOps-friendly Jobs-as-Code approach that makes it easy to build automation and increased reliability into workflows.
Control-M can serve as comprehensive platforms because of their many integrations. As noted, the solutions can support all SAP versions and job types. They also support many other enterprise workflows and have more than 100 native integrations to popular tools, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud (and many of their components), Oracle, Informatica, SQL, Red Hat, Kubernetes, Apache Airflow, Hadoop, Spark, Databricks, UiPath, OpenText (Micro Focus), Alteryx, and many more.
A migration to SAP S/4HANA will ultimately only be successful if workflows run reliably, improve day-to-day work for business users, and support the enterprise’s plans for innovation. Therefore, a modern workflow orchestration platform is key to unlocking the full potential of SAP S/4HANA.
To learn more about how Control-M can improve your SAP S/4HANA migration and other SAP workflows, visit our website!
