1/22/2018 How to decide between a Greenfield and Brownfield S/4HANA transition | SAP Blogs

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How to decide between a Greenfield and

Brownfield S/4HANA transition
April 22, 2016 | 7,975 Views |

Frank Schuler
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SAP S/4HANA
brownfield | greenfield | s/4hana | transisiton

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For transitioning to S/4HANA there are two fundamental options. You could
either implement S/4HANA from scratch and migrate your existing data in a

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greenfield approach, or alternatively you could transition your existing ECC to

S/4HANA including all of its customizations and data in a brownfield approach.

To make this decision, in my experience, the following dimensions have to be

evaluated:

Data Quality / Unicode / Archive

When transitioning to S/4HANA, data matters big time.

Unicode
To start with, S/4HANA does only support Unicode. If your ECC system was
on multiple code pages (MDMP) a Unicode conversion would have to be
included into the transition. Technically, the SAP S/4HANA transition tools
(SUM DMO option) support this conversion, but more importantly, your
business would have to provide the respective vocabularies, which could be
integrated into a data migration approach.

Archive
While the reorganization and column store compression of an S/4HANA
transition regularly shrinks your data footprint considerably, it remains
important that you only take relevant data in-memory due to the huge price
difference between memory and disk capacity. Therefore, you would either
have to implement a data retention strategy upfront a technical transition to
S/4HANA or integrate it into your data migration approach.

Data Quality
With S/4HANA, operational reporting could be run real-time on your
transactional data without the need to load it into a data warehouse

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environment. However this implies, that there is no transformation step as it

was in a traditional ETL approach any longer, so that the data quality has to be
given in the system itself. To achieve this, there are two steps required.

Passive Data Governance

Either prior to your transition to S/4HANA or as part of the data migration, your
data foundation has to be cleansed. Whichever you find easier or is more
feasible will drive your decision.

Active Data Governance

Once cleansed, your data foundation has to be maintained clean, regardless a
greenfield or brownfield approach.

Integration / Interfaces
In a real-time environment like S/4HANA, integration makes a bigger
difference than ever, since real-time information on batched data has no
benefit. Therefore any interface into S/4HANA or out of it would either have to
be revisited prior to the transition or re-implemented with real-time in mind as
part of the migration.

Versions / Patches

Simple Finance, on-premise edition 1503

Technically Simple Finance, on-premise edition 1503, is based on EhP 7 for
ERP 6.0, which runs on SAP NetWeaver 7.40 and HANA as the database.
Therefore a transition from an earlier release is very similar to a respective
upgrade and a data migration less likely the preferred alternative.

S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511

Technically S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511, is based on S/4HANA core
components that run on SAP NetWeaver 7.50 and SAP HANA as the
database database. Therefore a lot of components have started to be
changed and a transition would have more the character of a migration.

Modifications / Enhancements
Your modifications and enhancements would have to be checked for S/4HANA
compliance. SAP provide a tool for this, that I described in my earlier blog:
Make the S/4HANA Custom Code Analyser work for you and some of the
corrective measures might be automatable, but there remains effort.

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Therefore, if you had a lot of custom code that is of no value any longer, a
migration and S/4HANA compliant re-implementation of the still required
enhancements might be an opportunity for further simplification.

Configuration / Features
Please be aware, that S/4HANA is work in progress and that not all the
functionality that had been available in ECC 6.0 is available in S/4HANA, on-
premise edition 1511 yet. Please check the User Assistance for SAP
S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511 for what functionality has already been
made available. Also not all industry solutions and add-ons, whether from SAP
or 3rd parties, are S/4HANA compliant yet. For SAP products the SAP HANA
readiness can be checked in the PAM. For 3rd party software you would
however contact the respective vendor. Missing functionality, a non S/4HANA
compliant industry solution or add-on would of course prevent you from a
transition whereas you might still be able migrate, if you could provide the
respective functionality in another way.

User Experience / Mobility

The strategic S/4HANA user interface is Fiori, but in SAP S/4HANA, on-
premise edition 1511 quite a few transactions are still rendered in SAPGUI for
HTML leveraging Screen Personas. Therefore, regardless the approach, I
would recommend that you make yourself familiar with those UI technologies
and get the technical foundation for Fiori in place.

Summary
If you had a streamlined system in terms of code, data and integration or could
get to one without too much pain, a brownfield transition to S/4HANA would be
the recommended option. However, if you had a lot of technical debt in your
system, a greenfield migration would be the more feasible option that would
reward you with a clean and simplified result.

Alert Moderator

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10 Comments
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Bijay Kumar Barik

April 23, 2016 at 1:58 pm

Hi Frank,

Thank you for sharing wonderful information on implementation of S/4HANA from

scratch and migration prospective.

Regards,

Biju K

Venkata Thirunagari

June 30, 2016 at 3:57 am

Thank you for sharing the information. Great Blog

Frank Schuler Post author

June 30, 2016 at 8:04 am

Thank you Venkata,

I also wrote a follow on blog at SAPPHIRE in case you are interested how
to Prepare your journey onto S/4HANA.

Finally, if you could express your opinion about my blog by rating it (the
stars at the bottom) that would be very much appreciated.

Best regards

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Frank

Babusrinath Krishnareddy

September 12, 2016 at 1:44 am

Hi Frank,

This is very informative.

Appreciate for sharing your thoughts!

I have question though, how does SAP HCM is considered for Green/Brown field
implementations. Having this been said, payroll data (cluster data) is critical to move
forward in new S/4HANA box.

Thanks!

Babu

Frank Schuler Post author

September 12, 2016 at 5:20 am

Hello Babu,

for me, the S/4HANA architecture and roadmap, suggests, that

SuccessFactors is SAP’s strategic HCM solution. Therefore, the strategic
solution for payroll seems to be SuccessFactors Cloud Payroll. However, at
least in S/4HANA Enterprise 1511, there is still a complete ECC 6.0 EhP8
HR module awailable.

Best regards

Frank

Michelle Crapo

February 9, 2017 at 6:51 pm

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Excellent blog. I just finished week 3 in an Open SAP course. That was of course
very good. But then I went searching for some more information and found this blog.
It re-enforced the course, and added details. I’m my way to your SAPHIRE blog from
the link above.

Thank you for writing it,

Michelle

Guillem Oña

February 16, 2017 at 3:07 pm

Great blog!

Very helpful to analyse the pros and cons of both scenarios

Thanks!

Guillem

Xavi Herce

February 16, 2017 at 5:04 pm

Great article Frank,

I would probably add a summary section with some of the other business drivers
(business) that can drive that decision as per example:

Are the processes designed and implemented in the past aligned with my current
needs? Should I reengineer some of this processes?
It’s my organization ready to embrace a change in this direction. How can get familiar
with this environment?
Do I have the necessary skills within my organization?

In summary, which intermediate steps can I trigger in my organization in order to have a

smooth transition embrace the change broadly?

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Xavi

Xavier Herce

February 16, 2017 at 5:21 pm

Frank,

I will recommend in order to evaluate in terms of features implemented and main

changes in the S/4 HANA system to be evaluated to check out this blog

Xavi

keith blastland

August 30, 2017 at 4:38 pm

Hi Frank, really good articule. Do you have anything on Dev Ops in an SAP
environment?

Keith_blastland@mccormick.com

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