SAP Solution: Hana

IBM and SAP have announced a milestone in their long-standing partnership. IBM is undertaking one of the world's largest transformation projects based on Hana and S/4 to drive its own growth and better support its customers.

Most information technology transformations can only succeed if business processes (algorithms) and the business information of the organizational and operational structure (data structures) are consolidated, harmonized, orchestrated and ultimately transformed.

SAP's color theory finds a continuation. On the current cover is "Power of Orange" and Gregor Stöckler, member of the SNP management, writes on page 14 about the other field variants and naturally ends his text with: Power of Blue.

The global transformation of the IT industry to the cloud has also reached SAP customers. In retrospect, interestingly enough, S/4 Hana also came onto the market at almost the same time.

At the end of last year, the E-3 editorial team began a research project: Can the S/4 conversion succeed with the existing resources? There were two answers: Yes, because SAP provides good tools. No, because consultants are missing and the concepts are not designed for complex data structures.

How and where is corporate data stored securely? Already in 2019, a medium-sized company had an unimaginable average of 13.53 petabytes of data to organize. That number keeps going up and up and up.

A spontaneous discussion arose about the contemporary nature of Hana and S/4. This is very exciting because it covers many dimensions, including the future of SAP.

SAP S/4 Hana is entering its darned seventh year this year. In the IT industry, such time spans are technological "generations". Many customers are wondering how much time SAP still needs to successfully complete the S/4 Hana strategy.

At the beginning of the year, E-3 Magazine asked to what extent Hana and S/4 are still up to date. This is not a blasphemy of SAP's ERP doctrine, but a pragmatic view of the S/4 conversion.

The S/4 migration is one of the big IT shakes of the coming years. The upcoming migration is inevitable; in 2030, manufacturer support for the predecessor solutions will end.

With the changeover from ERP/ECC 6.0 to S/4 Hana, the business partner concept, which has long been familiar from the SAP CRM world, becomes mandatory.

Seamless and coherent user experiences are crucial for success in digital business. In practice, a number of functional IT systems must interlock - especially CRM and ERP. With the Connected Journey Suite, PwC is trying to build a bridge.