Essential Guide

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Editor's note

The road to SAP S/4HANA will be neither smooth nor straight, but it is one that SAP customers will have to take eventually.

The question is not whether you should make an S/4HANA migration, as SAP will eventually transition everyone off of the legacy ERP platforms -- the conventional date given for the end of support is 2025. So, the question then becomes: When and how are you going to get on the road, and what will the final destination look like? SAP provides a roadmap to S/4HANA, but as with a car trip, a roadmap can only provide so much information. It can show you the marked roads and highways, the cities and towns along the way, and the geographic features of the landscape, but it can't show you the best roads to take or what obstacles you might face on the way. The roadmap also can't provide the experiences of those who have made the trip before you.

So, when you start planning that SAP S/4HANA migration, let this essential guide take you beyond what the roadmap provides.

SAP customers contemplating an S/4HANA migration have much to consider before they travel the first mile. What's the ultimate goal for the project? What are the best deployment options: on premises, cloud, hybrid? If it's cloud, will it be private, public, a combination?

Then, there are myriad technical and business process decisions that have to be made. Can you build a strong business case? How will the technical architecture look? What applications and platforms need to be integrated? What will the data strategy be? How will you deal with existing business processes or create new ones? Will you start small and roll out modules gradually, or do it all in a big bang?

Start your S/4HANA migration here.

1Real-world examples

Find out how organizations are making the transition to S/4HANA, and read examples of how S/4HANA is at the core of real digital transformations.

2Inside information and evaluation

Delve more deeply into the questions and issues around a move to S/4HANA.