A Pleasing ERP Legacy

An ERP system is always a central component of a company’s overarching IT system and necessitates special attention. Most SAP systems have been customized, optimized, orchestrated with other applications, and consolidated over many years. There is a lot of knowledge and experience in the operational SAP applications, which is why SAP customers have repeatedly raised the retirement age.

Even SAP was not quite sure when ERP/ECC 6.0 should be sent to its well-deserved retirement. As a result, ECC has been in a state of restless retirement for the past ten years, and the junior in the form of S/4 has had major problems competing with the senior. The situation is well known in the SAP community: R/3 and the legendary R/3 Enterprise also had a long life in the data centers of SAP customers. Former SAP CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott had great difficulty managing a smooth release change from R/3 and ECC with AnyDB to Hana and S/4. According to SAP's business plan, S/4 Hana should have been the ERP standard for many years.

The will to survive of R/3 and ECC 6.0 is unbroken in the SAP community. But legacy systems are and will remain legacy systems, which is why every SAP customer should now be considering a transformation: ERP must be evaluated on the basis of new offerings. The R/3 black box may still be alive, but as a closed system with few external interfaces, this ERP patient is no longer up to date and deserves to be retired. Whether the joy of a new ERP system must necessarily lead to the cloud should be carefully examined.

Process mining, artificial intelligence, enterprise architects, IT platforms and cloud computing all require new ERP concepts. Orchestration in the operating room must continue and no longer be limited to SAP. SAP customers should now consider AI from hyperscalers, platforms from alternative vendors such as Boomi, and CRM and HCM systems from Salesforce or Workday. The SAP Business Technology Platform has opened the door to composable ERP.