44% of large companies reported that legacy systems are holding back their business, and 74% of these companies claimed this was due to siloed data or lack of visibility across their systems.
B2B organizations, especially wholesale distributors, know they need to upgrade their tech stack, but still many have not done so. This is due to the significant challenges that businesses face when considering a large-scale migration such as:
- Limited internal resources to support the migration
- Complexity of the ERP landscape
- Collaboration challenges among different departments
- Difficulties prioritizing of digital transformation efforts to minimize operational downtime
However, there is a way to perform a successful migration without detracting from the bottom line.
The Need to Upgrade Your System – What’s the Business Value?
In the SAP world, migrating from ECC to S4/HANA, SAP’s cloud-based platform, is no easy task. But, there is a tremendous amount of value in upgrading to a cloud-based system, such as:
- Cost savings
- Increased visibility
- More accurate forecasting
- Reduced operational complexity
- Automation of tedious tasks
- Quicker employee training
Why Start Now?
With outdated systems, businesses can only be reactive—not proactive. This is due to the lack of data availability and transparency, poor connectivity between business units, and lagging programs. This keeps businesses from being accurate, efficient, and agile.
By improving the technology foundation and adding on a more efficient sales process, businesses can communicate better and more effectively with their customers, among other benefits.
As a result, your ability to react is much more profound, and you are better able to exceed your customers’ expectations.
The Hurdles
As mentioned above, digital transformation is no easy undertaking. In fact, according to a recent CIO magazine article, only 12% of current SAP customers have completed their migration to the company’s S/4HANA platform. Considering the fact that SAP is set to cease support for its long-running ECC on-premise suite by 2030, this low completion rate is alarming.
So what’s stopping these digital transformations from happening?
For many, it is often the uncertainty and fear of the unknown since they don’t necessarily know what this new technology will bring.
Another obstacle is cost. Undertaking a huge digital transformation project is a resource-intensive endeavor, so the thought of scaling the team to support such a migration can be daunting.
Many organizations have also developed custom code for their SAP SD modules over the years to make it more effective and to get the most out of their system. However, when it comes time to upgrade their ERP, they will have to find and mitigate each one of these customizations. This takes an enormous amount of time and resources.
Lastly, there is a risk of impacting sales. Sales is the driver of every business, and in order to upgrade to the newest cloud-based technology, companies run the risk of taking sales offline in order to upgrade. Stopping that flow of cash to any degree would be detrimental.
But, there is a way to address these issues and continue the system upgrade without impacting sales much at all. This can be done by breaking the migration into smaller pieces, making it easier to prioritize and manage.
How Can You Simplify Migration?
Our solution, OMS+, offers an easy migration path to upgrade your existing SAP system. Our product is embedded into SAP itself, interacting directly with your SAP data for rapid implementation that is easy to scale and sustain.
As mentioned previously, finding and mitigating each customization in SAP SD is time-consuming and cost-intensive. However, if you pre-game your upgrade by first “de-coupling” the SAP SD module from the rest of the upgrade, you will ultimately reduce the risks, costs and change management typically associated with large scale migrations.
By doing this first, even a year in advance, it removes the potential impact to your sales and distribution processes from the scope of the larger upgrade. In other words, customers keep their sales processes engaged when the organization is ready to go live with their rest of their upgrade. Organizations can go into their larger upgrade already having their sales and distribution processes converted and they don’t even miss a beat when the switch is made.
One of our customers who did this found that OMS+ only cost them 3% of their total migration upgrade–but saved them untold amounts of time, money and frustration if they had to migrate their highly customized SAP SD solution.
If your sales processes are a stumbling block to digitally migrating your ERP instance you may want to consider pre-gaming your migration by ‘decoupling sales’ to avoid costly mitigation efforts, lessen the disruption to sales, and streamline the impact of change management across the organization. For more information, visit www.dataxstream.com.