Minimizing Business downtime converting to SAP S/4HANA®

Business downtime plus technical downtime determine a window where, typically during the weekend, our customers interrupt activities on SAP ECC side to be able to restart business transactions on the renewable SAP S/4HANA^®. Usually small & medium sized companies accept more flexible stops, large companies impose very short time and, in some cases, ask for a progressive movement (company-by-company, region-by-region, etc) or ask for a subset footprint on data conversion.

How do we manage these scenarios? We have different options to put in place.

As we know, converting to SAP S/4HANA, business & technical downtime run-time are determined by database footprint and functional activities like SAP S/4HANA Finance activation with CVI Business Partner conversion:

How to minimize business & technical downtime?

1. Anticipate CVI Business Partner conversion on SAP ECC side in silent mode: yes, it is possible to anticipate on the SAP ECC side the CVI conversion applying a “silent mode” conversion during the business-as-usual. In this case, when SAP S/4HANA Conversion will run, Business Partner will be already in place
2. Anticipate Pre-Check functional verification: yes, it is possible to anticipate check and resolution of master data and business document on SAP ECC side. In this case, when SAP S/4HANA Conversion will run, Pre-Check will solve faster the phase
3. Archive business document no more relevant; purge technical non-used data from standard table. Usually different Gigabyte – in some case Terabyte – of data are persistent on SAP ECC database without any business values
4. Apply NZDT Near-Zero-Down-Time SAP Service to convert with “delta reply” your SAP ECC database to SAP S/4HANA new data-model during business-as-usual activities without business interruptions, having the opportunity to convert more than 10Tb in few hours
5. Apply the new SUM-NZDT option available starting from SAP S/4HANA 1909 toolkit to anticipate data-model conversion in uptime window
6. Apply “bluefield” or similar approach managing data footprint in slices – thanks to CBS solution – where “the elephant can be sliced”. Slices can be arranged in different waves having mandatory one for the Go-Live and additionals after the Go-Live – in silent mode, without business-downtime; slices can be arranged by fiscal years, business perimeters & scope, others.

As we have different options to reduce downtime, it means we have the opportunity to consider a “move-to-cloud” approach in conjunction with SAP S/4HANA Conversion, the “en plein”!

Gianluca Simeone

Expert in SAP, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA

Senior Technology Expert with 20 years of experience on SAP areas. Passionate and motivated leader with different technologies background, having followed also the SAP technical stream evolutions from Netweaver to HANA and S/4HANA. Part of business evelopment, presales and delivery team with skills developed from the Prospect Sales meeting to the Implementation and Projects lifecycles. Technical leader on disruptive and non-disruptive innovative SAP solutions implementations, Cloud, Mobility, in-memory, UX