Any organisation working in the SAP ecosystem will know that their on-premises enterprise resource planning system — ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) — is to be replaced. A core part of Business Suite 6 — and subsequent enhancement packages 7 and 8 — SAP has committed to providing mainstream maintenance until the end of 2027. But beyond this, you will need to buy a maintenance extension until 2030 for an incremental 2% in fees.1 Unless, that is, you are among the few that have already switched to S/4HANA, SAP's newest cloud-based ERP product.
Naturally, many organisations are looking to have their environments migrated before 2027. As IT practitioners will know, three years is not a long time to successfully execute a migration. In this article, we’ll cover a selection of tools that we use that will not only expedite your migration to the cloud, but optimise your business processes in the cloud.
Streamlining SAP migration to the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
At PwC, we have simplified the SAP migration process to the cloud. One of our cloud leaders in the UK has developed several services to expedite and optimise SAP instances on the AWS platform, while identifying 20-30% cost savings. These include: PwC Modern Data Platform Assessment for GenAI, SAP S/4 Launchpad | 6 week Proof of Concept and SAP RISE Cloud Assessment. This is an important first step as this establishes the cloud foundation to migrate your ERP to the cloud.
Remediate technical debt and stale data
Studies have identified that 23 to 42 percent of their development time is spent on technical debt.2 As well as the cost of technical debt, organisations are struggling to find resources to maintain this code and once an upgrade is required, it becomes challenging to remediate custom code to the latest version.
An approach to this is SAP’s Clean Core Strategy to reduce custom code, archive stale data, increase operational efficiency, execution and innovation. SAP has also developed the Business Technology Platform (BTP) to support development with services including application development and automation, data and analytics, integration, extended planning and analysis and artificial intelligence. The most consumed BTP service in implementations is integration. SAP offers the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology (ISA-M). This tool provides templates that can be adapted to integrate with non-SAP technologies. For legacy code, there is also the option to convert to modern environments. SAP offers S/4HANA Custom Code Analysis and Impact analysis to simplify migrating legacy code through the ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC).
Streamline business processes with Signavio
Once the code and integration has been remediated and the foundation platform is in place, SAP Signavio, a business process intelligence tool, can identify business bottlenecks and streamline business processes.
It can provide recommendations into what process automation templates or AI Business Services to use to improve process efficiency. There are many standard processes performed manually that can be automated. Most of these automated features exist in the office of the Chief Financial Officer. For example, SAP has automated the Accounts Receivable process. One customer reduced its account reconciliation process by 160 days. Another — a large manufacturer — has 6000 document requests automated each year by using AI Business Services. Documents are classified and processed based on the request and technologies, including process automation.
Using Generative AI to migrate custom code
PwC is collaborating with SAP and AWS to develop solutions that use SAP BTP services to automate business processes, and AWS Generative AI solutions to expedite the transformation processes.
AWS is the largest hyperscaler and offers its own tooling to compliment BTP. AWS has many Generative AI services such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q.
We have developed our own generative AI tools using Amazon Q called PwC SAP Expert. Using Amazon Q’s simple low code approach to creating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions, we trained the solutions with SAP official documentation sources and curated PwC industry best practices and domain expertise (Tax, Digital Supply Chain). There are numerous software development kits (SDKs), services and a joint SAP/AWS reference architecture to help organisations understand how to combine the strengths of AWS and SAP BTP services.
AWS has trained their Amazon CodeWhisperer on billions of lines of code. It understands comments written in natural language (in English) and can generate multiple code suggestions in real time to improve developer productivity. When launched in preview form in 2022, developers who used it were 57% faster at code generation and 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully.3
We're currently speeding up the code migration process to improve delivery timelines. We're also keeping track of our own metrics to detail how to boost productivity throughout the entire S/4HANA transformation process. Watch this space.
If you would like to talk about your switch from SAP ECC to S/4HANA contact Nicholas Nicoloudis.
