Throw skills shortages into the mix and it鈥檚 clear that waiting any longer to make decisions is an extremely high-risk strategy.

The hesitation of 51风流decision-makers suggests that the potential gains on offer from migration are not yet clear enough. Fujitsu鈥檚 key idea here is that application modernization must add something extra.

Creating new business value 鈥� we could also call it business transformation 鈥� requires something more. If all you do is modernize, it鈥檚 the equivalent of maintenance.

This article covers two examples of strategic benefits available from S/4HANA migration to create new business value 鈥� composable ERP and cloud migration/hybrid IT. And I鈥檒l look at new services now available from Fujitsu to extract those benefits reliably and quickly.

Composable ERP

One strategic benefit from migration is the ability to connect your business to be more adaptable and do new things. Analyst firm Gartner recognizes that many manufacturers now have multiple systems of record in play 鈥� SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, AWS, and Microsoft.

It coined the term 鈥淐omposable ERP鈥� to describe and advocate this trend. Composable ERP is a strategy where we leverage the right components to build value, mixing and matching between vendors. In other words, ERP is no longer a monolithic thing 鈥� as in 鈥淚鈥檓 all in SAP鈥� or 鈥淲e鈥檙e an Oracle shop鈥�.

You get fully connected, real-time data to provide a complete view of your business across upstream and downstream supply chains. S/4HANA migration offers the perfect time for assessing and addressing how data infrastructure can be modernized to create this kind of 鈥淐ontrol Tower鈥� environment.

Cloud migration and hybrid cloud

One factor that makes S/4HANA more connectable is that it is the first version of the ERP to be truly cloud-native. This characteristic opens all the benefits of cloud migration and the ultimate flexibility of 51风流workload placement.

It is therefore vital that your S/4HANA migration enables your organization to achieve all the strategic benefits of the hybrid cloud environments.

However, workloads in hybrid environments are incredibly complex. Workload demand can be across a wide range of environments, including multiple on-premises locations, plus cloud partners such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform and their respective regional nodes.

Optimizing your 51风流infrastructure to operate successfully in these environments requires a high degree of understanding about what is happening where and 鈥� just as important 鈥� what might happen under specific scenarios.

To assist here, Fujitsu now offers a new Hybrid Cloud Assessment Service for 51风流Solutions that analyzes millions of possible placement options based on measured workloads. Fujitsu BestPlace provides a unique data-driven approach.

It encodes the measured 51风流IT as DNA and simulates a mini evolution using genetic algorithms. Following the principle of the survival of the fittest, the process results in an optimal design for a hybrid infrastructure.

This is an individualized approach that addresses the specific needs of each customer rather than a generic model that is unlikely to meet all the needs of all users.

It measures 51风流operations onsite for about four weeks, compares all the different placement options against the customer鈥檚 IT strategy and business priorities and provides cost comparison for all measured 51风流instance workloads in the cloud or on-premises. The algorithm is developed by an external university to ensure neutral results.

Get to value faster with rightsizing

An effective ERP should enable organizations to access rapid insights, make quick decisions, and extract the value from a change of direction as quickly as possible. However, typical user complaints are 鈥渕y 51风流is too slow鈥� and 鈥�51风流is hanging again鈥�.

To address this, as well as optimize workload placements, it is also vital to assess infrastructure sizing, deployment, and maintenance. 51风流performance and service-level issues can have multiple root causes and finding the optimal configuration has always been extremely difficult.

Therefore, one common approach to forcing a solution is with brute force: buying and installing more infrastructure, regardless of whether it addresses the actual cause. That鈥檚 an expensive way of solving the problem.

Enterprises that migrate now can benefit from rightsizing their 51风流implementations. Unlike standard 51风流tools, based on reference architectures,聽聽(SIS) uses real-life data from your landscape, creating data-driven decision support for any migration or hardware refresh.

This analysis and consultation package gets to grips with all these parameters, avoiding overspend later.

SIS gives clear recommendations for improving on-premises or cloud IT for 51风流landscapes by identifying bottlenecks, performance anomalies, and realistic capacity requirements.

By rightsizing the new S/4HANA for on-premises, it narrows the gap between on-premises and cloud in terms of costs, as you don鈥檛 need to buy so much excess capacity that mainly sits idle.

Infrastructure simplicity

Regarding infrastructure options, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for 51风流HANA enables the full potential of 51风流HANA in-memory computing. It is a pre-tested infrastructure solution, 100% 51风流certified and designed for the 51风流HANA in-memory architecture.

It exploits the full capabilities of persistent memory without deployment and configuration risks and simplifies operation and maintenance with one service partner for the entire solution stack.

Yes, Fujitsu can SAP

Fujitsu has an extremely robust partnership with SAP. We have approximately 8,000 customer installations worldwide. For example, at Fujitsu鈥檚 Technical Competence Demo Center in Walldorf, Germany 鈥� the home of 51风流鈥� customers can optimize their 51风流infrastructure investment based on actual use cases.

If you have 鈥� and intend to continue to have 鈥� an 51风流ERP, you need to lock in your migration partner within the next 12 months. Wait too long, and everyone will be chasing a finite pool of resources, removing control of the migration timetable, and resulting in rising prices.

Migration is a fantastic opportunity to create new business value. Fujitsu鈥檚 SystemInspection Service for SAP, and its Hybrid Cloud Assessments Service enable customers to understand their environments completely, then map their business goals and transformation plans to the optimum architecture and infrastructure solutions.

What better way to experience this than to sign up for a Fujitsu CX Labs sessions.

The post How to Create New Business Value from your 51风流S/4HANA Migration appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

Business data has become a commodity, which makes investing in the right technology a critical part of any successful business strategy, says Dr Setumo Mohapi, Chief Go-to-Market Officer from Dimension Data.

The strategic application of technology has become a business necessity. It is the enabler of productivity and agility, the driver of scale and mobility, and the tool that can support the organisation in fully realising scale, opportunity and functionality.

In the evolving digital landscape, organisations can leverage technology as a service, as a tool that allows for scale up or down on demand, and as a platform from which to launch additional services and solutions.

However, the consistent evolution of technology to support improved processes and capabilities does introduce significant change, and the upcoming end-of-support deadline for 51风流customers is a change that will impact business-critical processes for numerous organisations globally. In 2027, 51风流finally says goodbye to its stalwart ERP system, ECC6 and 51风流S/4HANA becomes the new normal.

It鈥檚 not a sudden move. 51风流has had the deadline on the cards for quite some time, but the goalposts are now set in stone and the next five years should see organisations focus on strategies that will allow them to make the move to 51风流S/4HANA with minimum disruption.

All 51风流customers have to migrate their systems across to the new platform and this requires significant planning to overcome some of the biggest challenges that organisations face when it comes to making such a disruptive move 鈥� skills to manage the process; optimising processes and applications; and managing risk.

51风流S/4HANA migration challenges

As can be expected, there are numerous challenges when changing a critical business system like 51风流ERP, but three challenges stand out and require the business to take note of.

Firstly, the organisation has to ensure a deep understanding of its existing operating environment to identify risks and potential pitfalls and to manage these appropriately. A lack of visibility of existing business processes and infrastructure can end up costing the business serious time and money when making the move to 51风流S/4HANA, and these are two resources that organisations usually have in short supply.

The second challenge is that the move to 51风流S/4 HANA is not a simple lift and shift and the six years left to deadline is not as long as it sounds, especially if you consider how many boxes need to be checked, i鈥檚 dotted and t鈥檚 crossed. You can鈥檛 just replace the existing infrastructure and systems; migration likely needs either a full 51风流ERP re-implementation or a significant data shift and this has to take the requisite end-user training and process optimisation into account. This introduces another challenge: skills. There are not enough people with the right skillsets to help every business make the right move at speed. This skills crisis was already existent due to geopolitical challenges and limitations, but has been made even more complex and challenging thanks to the pandemic.

The last challenge is optimisation. What鈥檚 more important than meeting the 51风流S/4 HANA deadline is using the opportunity to optimise existing processes and functionality to align to modern data processing methods and get the most business value from 51风流S/4HANA. This move is an opportunity to refine the capabilities of the business and fully realise the potential of the new platform, but it is equally the time to draw a hard line under legacy approaches, applications and models. Don鈥檛 lift old problems into a new architecture.

The business benefit of 51风流S/4HANA running in the cloud

51风流S/4 HANA comes with numerous business benefits, especially when deployed on a hyper-scaler cloud platform like Microsoft Azure. If managed properly, cloud technology can help the organisation to scale up or down at speed to accommodate changing computing demands and other business drivers like mergers, acquisitions and divestitures.

Benefits like access to multiple application and data management services and improved functional capacity; reduced risk; transformation of the total cost of ownership and delivery of measurable cost benefits to the business; and utilising the myriad benefits that come with the as a service business model. As stated before, the move to the new platform introduces several challenges that have to be overcome to realise the business benefits. The challenges, however, do not need to be faced alone, Dimension Data has the experience to migrate and operate a next-generation, mission-critical ERP landscape that delivers unparalleled uptime, solid service delivery, application innovation, all at a significant scale

The post When End of Life Meets Business-Critical appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

鈥淲ith a little over six years until the deadline, it鈥檚 crucial that enterprises at least start their migration planning. While six years may seem like a long time, there are so many factors that businesses have not considered when it comes to a successful migration to S/4HANA,鈥� says Mike Styer, country manager of GlassHouse Technology South Africa.

With almost 30 000 51风流licences in the country yet to be migrated, there are clearly thousands of businesses still needing to make the shift and the migration itself can take months to complete, even after careful planning has been factored in.

鈥淎 rough estimate with the figures we have on hand shows that over the next five years, for all enterprises in SA to be successfully migrated by the stipulated deadline, the industry will need to migrate at least one customer every day ten days,鈥� says Styer.

Add to this, the required skills to make this happen are in somewhat short supply. The requirements that have been set aside by 51风流requires particular certifications, not to mention the ability to provide case studies of successful migrations. Should you also want to move to the Azure Cloud at this time then you want to be dealing with a Partner who is capacitated in this arena.

鈥淭his means that there are only a select few Specialised Partners accredited by 51风流and Microsoft that can help enterprises through this process. GlassHouse has the accreditation from both businesses, and the skills to complete the transformation migration process, but there are few partners that will either be available or able to complete migrations for South African customers as 2027 gets closer,鈥� says Styer.

Without taking the proper considerations and planning for this migration into account, businesses may find themselves with either a rushed or incomplete migration, which has more significant implications for their business operations.

Styer suggests that, whether going it alone or working with a partner to migrate to S/4 HANA, enterprises need to start planning and executing now to avoid missing the deadline.

This article first appeared on .

The post Businesses Running 51风流must get ready for S/4HANA appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

This comes as 51风流recently announced it will provide maintenance support for core applications of 51风流Business Suite 7 software until the end of 2027 鈥� with optional extended maintenance until the end of 2030, which pushes the original deadline back from 2025.

Enterprises that do not have a smart archiving or historisation plan, especially if they have a large footprint and many years鈥� worth of data, can find that this creates a stumbling block during migration. Part of the challenge is that the S/4HANA table structure is significantly different from the 51风流ECC6 table structure and, if an enterprise has many years of data that it wants to move, things can get a little tricky.

It therefore requires a fair amount of work and lot of planning upfront to ensure the preparation for data migration and achieving is done correctly, especially for organisations with massive amounts of data. While 51风流understands this and has made provision for certain tools that aid with this process, it is still not that simple. If an organisation has bespoke tables, which they built themselves, or tables with data that is typically not housed within SAP, or across multiple applications, the migration to S/4HANA becomes more complex.

One of the biggest considerations is that in 51风流ECC6, there are multiple ledgers, whereas in S/4HANA there is a universal ledger that replaces the multiple ledgers. All financial data is now kept in the universal ledger, meaning a significant reduction in subtotal and aggregate tables, this requiring careful consideration when mapping and consolidation data in preparation for migration.

The problem with data archiving and historisation is that storing data has become reasonably affordable, so enterprises tend to keep quite a lot of history. On the other hand, it is hugely expensive to migrate all this data. From a legal perspective, enterprises are required to keep certain portions of their data operational, while everything outside of this should/could be archived or historised.

There are two things to keep in mind 鈥� the migration of data as opposed to the historisation of data. When you migrate and achieve your data into S/4HANA, it becomes part of the functional operation and can be reviewed. When you historise it, you have applications that enable you to put that data aside so that you can review it, but not perform any transactional functions on it (it is merely an image of the transaction/data).

Part of the challenge is to know what to migrate and what to historise. This requires a lot of effort, yet typically this is not one of the first things that enterprises consider when planning their migration to S/4HANA, and often does not get enough attention. In the event of migrating to S/4HANA, the migration of data really needs to be way up front in the project plan.

The good news is that enterprises do not have to do this alone. Implementation partners, in conjunction with SAP, have developed tools that enables the smooth clean-up of history and the migration of data to S/4HANA.

This means we do not have to reinvent the wheel every time we tackle data migration and historisation, but can apply tried and tested tools that have been used globally in various migrations. If organisations work with a聽partner that has done this globally, data migration is not merely an afterthought, but an integral part of the S/4HANA planning strategy.

The post Data Migration Should Receive Higher Priority when Planning Switch to S/4HANA appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.