Secrets Of A Successful SAP Migration

Computing speaks to three organisations whose ERP migrations have come in on time and on budget.

Migrating to a new ERP system is a painful prospect, but it's a nettle that must be grasped sooner or later - sooner in the case of SAP customers who face the end of support for ECC and early versions of S/4HANA over the next year or two. When it comes to enterprise systems no two organisations are the same so there's always an element of going it alone; nevertheless there are plenty of lessons to be learned from others' experiences. Computing spoke to three organisations whose ERP migrations have come in on time and on budget.

At UK and Ireland SAP User Group's Connect event in Birmingham in December, Computing spoke with three SAP customers - tobacco company Imperial Brands, Radisson Hotel Group and retailer QD Group - about their successful migrations, all of which came in on time and on budget and with minimal disruption to their businesses. Here's a look at what they have in common.

To Fail To Plan Is To Plan To Fail

To fail to plan is to plan to fail, as they say, and this is never truer than in the case of a complex, multi-stakeholder software project. If the foundations are not laid down well in advance, an ERP migration is doomed from the off. Requirements, roadmaps, documentation, launch dates, scheduled testing and coverage for backups and downtime must all be nailed down, together with assessments of how any outages will affect the business, alternative pathways should problems arise, and a strategy for how to communicate all this to the wider business.

Thought needs to be given to partnerships too as you’re unlikely to be able to go it alone. SAP offers migration assistance through its Rise managed service, but Rise may not be suitable for organisations with non-standard requirements, and even those who do avail themselves of SAP services will probably need to turn to the extensive partner ecosystem for additional assistance.

50 ERPs Into One Will Go

The scope of Imperial Brands' migration, known internally as Unify, is colossal. The multinational tobacco business is consolidating more than 50 ERP systems, including three SAP instances and multiple QAD systems, into a single private cloud-hosted S/4HANA setup. "The company grew through acquisition, so we were a bit weak in consolidating all this stuff, " explained data workstream lead Gunnar Glasneck.

However, new management has brought a determination to tackle this sprawl, with a mission to eliminate bottlenecks and improve data quality in pursuit of becoming a "data-driven, insightful, data-led company". SAP's imminent cutoff dates have also injected a sense of urgency to the undertaking.

Unify is designed to join together five major markets to create a more connected and coherent organisation, with plans to introduce unified standardisation and data governance policies by 2028, and to integrate mobile apps and automation. UK and Ireland operations have already been successfully migrated to SAP S/4HANA in the first tranche of the three-year process, and this has provided lessons for the current step, now under way: migrating the Australian business and a major factory in Poland.

"This year is super intense because we have a lot of parallel rollouts, plus time zone differences," Glasneck remarked.

Thousands Of Integrations To Consider

Radisson's migration to S/4HANA on AWS private cloud in a European datacentre was precipitated by the sale of the Americas arm of the hotel group in 2022. The ERP had been run as HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud on-premises) from a SAP datacentre in the US, but this was no longer tenable, not least for data protection reasons. The move may have been forced by circumstance, but it was also a chance to improve flexibility, scalability, cost control and responsiveness after years of dissatisfaction with the "expensive and rigid" SAP HEC setup, said head of SAP platforms Carlos Violero.

Unlike, for example, retail, there is no tailored SAP ERP solution for the hospitality sector, and front-end systems are generally provided by third parties - Indra TMS being a popular choice - or through bespoke customisations. "That's a lot of complexity for us, because we have dependencies and integrations to consider as we move forward with AI and automation and other things we're exploring now," Violero said.

The need to handle thousands of integrations put Rise out of the picture. "We discussed it but the licensing would have been too expensive, and TMS was not supported at that point."

Because of this complexity, the RFP processes to find suitable partners and cloud providers took way longer than the migration itself, Violero added. "But that was a really good exercise. It helped us minimise a lot of the work in the project execution, because we'd already done it. That's what enabled us to achieve the six-month timescale."

Finally Violero’s team settled on S/4HANA on AWS private cloud, hosted in Europe, with Lemongrass as the preferred migration partner.

A Two-Year Assessment

For QD Group, which operates a chain of garden centres and discount stores in England, the scoping process to replace its 15-year-old on-premises ECC 6.0 system began with a two-year vendor assessment. "In the end, we chose to stay with SAP, primarily because it is a platform that we trust," explained SAP operations manager, Simon Bacon. "What we didn't want to do was extend the life of our hardware just to get a couple more years. So we decided we're going to stay with SAP and we're going to move to S4."

QD’s business is characterised by seasonal peaks and troughs, and with migration scheduled to begin in January 2025, completion by June or July was vital if the Christmas intake was not to be impacted, which left a very tight 6-month window. Plus, QD's board had made it very clear that that the business must not be adversely affected by downtime. There was no room for error.

Bacon knew his team would need some help if they were to have any chance of meeting these key business objectives, eventually opting for the SAP Rise managed service with additional assistance from migration partner KaarTech.

Building The Right Team

For such a large undertaking, core migration teams are often quite small. Imperial Brands, a company of 25,000 people with more than 50 ERP systems to consolidate, has a core migration team of fewer than 20 permanent staff and contractors. To make up the numbers, the Glasneck's team brought in support from migration specialist Syniti. He emphasised the importance of selecting team members who will work well together.

"We have a one-team approach and virtual meetings to manage time zone challenges. And I would say migration is all about people, because you deliver through people. The leadership team is a fantastic mix of different skills and capabilities. You have extroverts, introverts, people with little transformation background, like me, and others who live and breathe transformation projects. So it's a mix; we learn from each other. And (he was careful to add), “We have a lovely boss leading all of us."

Syniti was chosen because of previous experience of working with Imperial Group as well as its global footprint. Glasneck said the company brings "all the tools and capabilities, and great people to help us move data from different legacy systems into S/4HANA."

A Fit For A Family-Style Culture

QD Group's technical team comprises just three people. "We're a small company with a very small IT team," commented Simon Bacon. "So the question was, could we run as fast as the project and keep pace with it?"

Bacon augmented his tiny team with SAP's Rise specialists and experts from partner KaarTech, aiming for a "collaborative, family-style” approach in line with the company's culture. "We're a family-owned business. We're quite a flat organisation, not hierarchical, not bureaucratic; we deal daily with the board of directors. So we wanted a company that would have that same ethos and culture, one that's open and relatable. We started speaking to the team there, and we connected."

It was not considered a drawback that KaarTech is not a retail specialist - few consultancies are, according to Bacon, and anyway SAP supports the retail sector out of the box. What was important was the fit. "[KaarTech] came up with an offer that was very attractive to our board, particularly as it was fixed price, so they knew what they were going to be paying. It wasn't all about price, though; skill and aptitude and capability are essential."

Indeed, Bacon tested KaarTech's's competency, asking them to build an automated process for a repetitive task. "They pushed back on some of what I was suggesting, which I thought was great because it meant they weren't bowing down to the customer; they were using their expertise." The automated application was built within three or four days and has been running successfully on a mission-critical process since then.

Bacon also praised the input from SAP. Despite the software giant being known for its enterprise solutions, there was no sense that QD Group was receiving a second-class service. "I think SAP realise not all their customers are like AstraZeneca. There are a lot of SMEs and you can approach projects in a way that's more cost effective and manageable for a smaller team and smaller budgets. Everyone was really helpful, and what we've seen post- go-live is that this hasn't stopped."

'The Key Point Is We All Work Together'

Carlos Violero's core team at Radisson Hotels Group was also compact, consisting of only four individuals, meaning he was especially reliant on partner Lemongrass to help with re-architecting the system and with the migration itself. "We have our internal team for SAP core, and then we have our extended team, as I call it, which is under Lemongrass. So I have around 70 people behind the scenes managing the infrastructure. But the key point is we all work together."

Lemongrass's efforts to understand Radisson's business was essential to the consultancy’s selection as well as the success of the project, he said. "I want to highlight the importance of the right partner, making sure they understand you and can adapt to how you do things. Making sure that your extra mile is their extra mile as well."

Post-migration, Lemongrass continues to work with Radisson in a support capacity.

Minimizing Downtime

A hotel chain is the epitome of customer-facing. Any disruption will be immediately felt by guests, who may decide to take their loyalty elsewhere. With hotel booking systems, check-in processes, bar and restaurant transactions and many other operations all dependent on the underlying SAP system, minimizing downtime during the move was priority number one.

The migration from HEC in the US to S/4HANA in a European private cloud was performed in waves, Violero explained, starting with low-risk, non-production environments; progressing to environments with the fewest dependencies; and finally moving on to business-critical, low-latency systems, with each wave treated as a learning process.

For the final stage, they made use of an offline bookings system used during scheduled maintenance to ensure that reservations could continue seamlessly during the unavoidable downtime while the final transfers were made, the old system switched off, and the new one turned on. At this stage any gaps in planning and preparation could have spelled disaster. "It was an intense time", said Violero, joking that the stress had caused him to lose his hair, but it went without a hitch.

"We started at 1.30 am and by 5.30 we'd officially finished the last stage of the migration. We validated replication of the main databases then we went live to the users, with our functions team continuing to validate things."

He re-iterated the importance of thorough preparation, ensuring all the possibilities are covered.

"What you need is to have a plan A, a plan B and a plan C, because what you are doing is migrating the whole thing from one location to another, and you're re-pointing all those 3,000 integrations from all the data centres, and integrations with partners like Booking.com, so a lot of things happen in those four hours."

Fourth time lucky

QD Group is less of a 24x7 business than Radisson, so the stakes were slightly less daunting. Nevertheless, customers are unforgiving of things like stock shortages and payment failures at checkout, so maintaining day-to-day operations during the move was a key priority, with "zero business disruption" one of the terms stipulated by the board.

The initial test run was not encouraging. "Downtime was nearly four days on our first migration run, which went against the main objective of no disruption," explained Simon Bacon. "So we reiterated the plan with using SAP database technology that was available on the cloud to help add more juice to the project. We did four test migration runs, each time refining the plan, and in the end the downtime was 27 hours."

Over one weekend in July, all of QD's shops and garden centres were moved onto the new Azure-based ERP.

"We pulled the system down on Friday and we were up and running on the Sunday, and for the business it was available early Monday morning."

Building on the successful migration

The momentum generated by a successful migration, the knowhow gained and the new capabilities on offer makes this a great time to kick off new initiatives.

At Radisson Hotels Group, Carlos Violero said the focus now is on introducing automation and reducing regular maintenance downtime to less than 50 minutes, via Lemongrass's Minimal Downtime Operations (MDO) service. He's also keen to make the most of what cloud has to offer, by prioritising transparency and cloud-first development. "We're making sure we're as transparent as possible for the community [stakeholders, business owners, developers, back-end support]. And we're making sure that all changes, new projects and new features are smart, and being done in a way that's cloud native. The current service is not yet cloud native, but we're working in that direction."

‘The Idea Is To Make Everything Seamless’

The migration at Imperial Brands is ongoing, with completion due in 2028. Lessons learned at each stage will see a standard global SAP core template rolled out across the five markets and factories. A major objective is improving data governance, and creating a platform on which future innovation can thrive.

"The idea is to make everything seamless, so you don't have to translate data from system to system," said Gunnar Glasneck. "We spend 60 or 70 percent of our time on data mining, gathering data, or talking to people who mistrust the data. We want to minimise that, clearly, and spend more time on analysing the data, understanding the data, and getting value out of the insights."

End-To-End Automation

At QD Group, moving to the new cloud-based ERP allows increased speed and agility, and the rapid deployment of new solutions, reducing the time required for certain tasks from weeks to hours.

"We're working across our entire supply chain," explained Simon Bacon. "So that's looking at the replenishment within procurement. We have 60,000 active SKUs, and it's a multifaceted and time-consuming task for the admin team. We are currently scoping a process automation project to use SAP Build Process Automation to stitch all of those independent but related tasks together and automate the process end to end, and that will free up so much manual time in a number of our garden centres.

"We're in the build stage of two custom applications that are really simple to use, but the clever stuff in the background is process automation that stitch those SAP processes together at the click of a button. We are connecting [SAP] Analytics Cloud to our S4 database, and our BI team are now learning how to use Analytics Cloud. We already have a use case for that, where real-time reporting will be really beneficial to the business."

This article originally appeared on MES Computing’s sister site Computing.