Orangefield: Added value

Greenfield, Brownfield, Bluefield and now Orangefield - what is the most successful S/4 conversion for the existing SAP customer? Green- and Brownfield are commonly known transformation rules for an SAP release change from ERP/ECC 6.0 with AnyDB to Hana and S/4. Blue- and Orangefield are creations of successful SAP partners with added value beyond the technical release change. Bluefield has already been successfully implemented in the SAP community, while Power of Orange is a young concept that is a summary of existing tools.

Accordingly, SAP's color theory is difficult to evaluate because the existing customer should choose between proven methods and proprietary solutions. If all the colors are mixed, the result is likely to be an unsightly hue - tending toward the sad color of black. Conversely, we know that at the beginning there is white light and that this is fanned out with a prism into the spectral colors, where we then very well find green, brown, blue and orange. Back to the origin?

Interestingly, Thomas Failer from DMI in Switzerland had about the same idea: back to the origin, see also E-3 text in March 2022 issue, page 17. An origin of computer science can be found at ETH Zurich, where once Professor Niklaus Wirth taught and wrote the IT standard work "Algorithms and Data Structures". Already the title explains the whole concept.

Meaningful data processing needs structures. These structures can be specified by various techniques, such as relational database, graph databases or blockchain. Processes must be applied to the structures so that data ultimately becomes information. Algorithms and data structures are the two sides of the same coin - one is useless without the other.

Trivial? Not quite, because it took almost half a century for Niklaus Wirth's concept to be understood, for Gartner analysts to declare the concept of data lake obsolete, and for the age of the data fabric to be proclaimed. Data Lake is structured and unstructured data in one big vessel. What is missing are the business processes (algorithms). That's why it's tedious to fish relevant information out of a data lake - not impossible, but very tedious for data scientists.

Data Fabric also tries to consolidate all data, but strives to preserve the network of relationships so that knowledge about the processes is not lost. Thomas Failer has gone one step further with his concept: All business objects are consistently stored for all data - in other words, colloquially speaking, a tuple of algorithms and data structures. Thomas Failer has applied for a patent for his method and he can extract data and processes from almost all ERP systems in a very short time.

Power of White: All data and processes of an ECC are exported in the shortest possible time and remain transparently retrievable from an S/4 in the future as if they were stored in a Hana database. This opens up the opportunity for downstream conversion in the shortest possible time.