Business Suite on Hana

In November 2015, SAP launched S/4 Hana, the next generation of its Business Suite. The old Business Suite will be supported until 2025, by which time user companies must have switched to SAP S/4 Hana.

However, in terms of complexity, the switch to S/4 Hana is in the same league as an R/2 to R/3 migration. SAP does not refer to S/4 Hana as an upgrade, but as a conversion.

In the context of S/4 Hana, reference is often made to the "Principle of One" philosophy: This means that there will only be one implementation option for a requirement in the future. This contrasts with the historically evolved Business Suite, where there are often various implementation options for a requirement.

One example of this is the replacement of the customer and supplier master in S/4 Hana by the business partner. Anyone can imagine the impact that SAP's efforts to clean up the code base will have on the customer's own coding.

Nevertheless, SAP S/4 Hana will be the SAP platform of the future. SAP refers to it as the "Digital Core". The changes in S/4 Hana compared to the Business Suite are not limited to purely technical aspects, but also include functional and process-related changes in particular.

SAP Business Suite, on the other hand, is a proven and stable product. The Business Suite on Hana has been available and established on the market since 2013. Many SAP user companies are still using the Business Suite on a non-Hana database. The question is: To what extent is the switch to Suite on Hana a sensible interim step on the long-term path to S/4 Hana?

Many companies have now successfully migrated their Business Suite to Hana. The product and the corresponding migration processes are now established and mature.

With the Business Suite on Hana, SAP user companies can already benefit from functional advantages that become available with Hana as a database. Some examples:

• The newly developed MRP Live, which has been optimized for Hana, offers all the business benefits and drastic performance gains of the corresponding S/4 Hana implementation.
• With a Suite on Hana, you can benefit from the advantages of operational real-time reporting ("Hana Live").
• A BW on Hana can use new options for efficient data access in conjunction with a Suite on Hana ("Smart Data Access").
• In addition, with a Suite on Hana, significant performance increases can be observed in some reports; the Hana optimizations of the Business Suite are listed in an SAP note.

Code & Data Cleansing

The main technical aspects of a Suite-on-Hana migration include the areas of code & data cleansing as well as SAP basis and infrastructure. In the area of code cleansing, the customer's own coding may need to be adapted for Hana (functional correctness) and should be optimized for Hana (performance).

In addition, it is advisable to log the use of the customer's own coding over a longer period (at least one year) in order to identify and isolate dead coding.

In the area of data cleansing, it is advisable to reduce the database volume in a targeted manner through housekeeping and archiving in the run-up to the Hana migration. This can save enormous costs. These code & data cleansing activities are sometimes quite lengthy, but will be required anyway in the course of a later S/4 Hana conversion.

In addition, with a Suite on Hana, the data center can already gain experience with the productive operation of a transactional application on a Hana database without experiencing an additional workload due to major process changes.

This is because Hana's own concepts in the area of high availability and reliability have led to a number of innovations, particularly when it comes to infrastructure.

License costs

With regard to license costs, every user company must check its license agreements to determine the impact of a Suite on Hana. It is not uncommon for the sum of the license costs for Business Suite and Hana to be lower than the sum of Business Suite and a third-party database provider, such as Oracle.

Innovations in the belly

It is important to note that a Suite on Hana (which implies SAP NetWeaver 7.40) already includes all the key technological innovations of S/4 Hana. Examples include SAP UI5 (Fiori) and Abap CDS Views - both technologies that are used extensively in S/4 Hana and will play a key role in any future S/4 Hana implementation.

With a Suite-on-Hana system, the IT department already has the technological building blocks to gain valuable practical experience in implementing and using the new technologies.

If you build up expertise in this way at an early stage, you can concentrate fully on implementing customer requirements during a later S/4 Hana implementation without having to laboriously familiarize yourself with the topic or make avoidable rookie mistakes.

By switching to Suite on Hana before an S/4 Hana conversion, many technical tasks that would have to be processed later in the course of an S/4 Hana conversion anyway are already completed in advance.

In addition, there is no need to edit process changes - which in turn are inevitable during an S/4 Hana conversion due to the functional innovations.

Instead of taking a big step from Business Suite on any-DB to S/4 Hana and processing both blocks of technical and functional adjustments in one step, a two-step process with the intermediate step of a Suite on Hana is recommended in many cases:

The Suite on Hana migration allows a concentration on technical aspects; the later step to S/4 Hana can thus be strongly focused on functional aspects. Result: The effort and risk involved in a later switch to S/4 Hana are significantly reduced.

Established migrations

How the migration to Suite on Hana is actually organized depends on the initial situation of the existing systems. There are three different options:

• The new implementation of a Suite-on-Hana system with data migration (greenfield approach)
• An upgrade of the SAP components with subsequent database migration (classic two-stage procedure)
• Upgrade & database migration in one step ("Database Migration Option" or "DMO" for short)

All processes are now established, market-proven and stable. Each option offers advantages and disadvantages: The greenfield approach with simultaneous data migration is particularly suitable for split & merge scenarios in which the Hana migration is to be combined with the separation of a subsidiary from the Business Suite, for example.

This contrasts with the effort required for data migration. The classic two-stage procedure offers the advantage of supporting a very large number of possible initial situations. However, two downtimes are required for the complete migration. The DMO procedure has the advantage of migration to Suite on Hana in one step, which is also downtime-optimized.

In addition, custom coding activities are usually required for a Hana migration; these can be structured into three blocks:

• Mandatory Hana code customizations
• Database-agnostic performance optimizations
• Hana-specific performance optimizations

With the right planning of Hana custom code management and a pragmatic approach, good optimizations can be achieved with manageable effort. The decision for a direct path to S/4 Hana or a Suite on Hana as well as the specific choice of migration procedure should always be derived individually for each company based on the specific situation.

Consultants such as cbs Corporate Business Solutions GmbH offer efficient methods that combine management consulting for development planning and system architecture with technology services. With the cbs S/4 Hana Transition Program, companies are specifically prepared for S/4 Hana and individual strategies for digital transformation are developed.

Experience has shown that the Suite-on-Hana migration can be combined very well with an upgrade to EHP 7 or EHP 8. The Business Suite test cycles that are already scheduled as part of the upgrade mean that the Hana adaptations are also implicitly tested.

Less effort, less risk

Conclusion: S/4 Hana will establish itself on a broad basis, but is still in its infancy. The SAP Business Suite on Hana, on the other hand, is established and stable. The migration to a Suite on Hana already offers many advantages.

It also minimizes the workload and risk involved in the future switch to S/4 Hana. And above all, it can be implemented efficiently and quickly with proven processes and manageable effort.