Preface

The world economy is currently undergoing a transformation. With increasing frequency, technological innovations are launched that exert drastic influence in our daily lives. The Internet, with its heightened interoperability of persons, products, and services, substantially impacts your enterprise and business processes. To consider this interoperability, you must reassess traditional business models and adapt your business processes if required. Exponential data growth requires innovative approaches for data storage and processing. In terms of system landscape, the requirements for outsourcing business processes to the cloud keep changing, but access to your systems via mobile devices ensures future viability. As the market leader for business software, we consider it our responsibility to help our customers, whatever the status their existing system landscapes may be, and support them in addressing the challenges of this digital transformation.

With SAP S/4HANA, SAP provides a modern ERP suite that uses the in-memory technology of SAP HANA to overcome the technical limits of traditional databases. SAP S/4HANA can become the digital core of central, mission-critical business processes such as accounting, logistics, procurement, and sales and distribution. The design of SAP S/4HANA is based on the following core aspects: simplification of the application, in particular simplification of data structures; simplification of the user experience through role-based user interfaces in SAP Fiori; embedded analytics; machine learning; and a cloud-first approach for developing new functions and business processes.

SAP S/4HANA allows customers to select the appropriate operation option for their business processes: running the business processes on-premise, operating entirely in the cloud, or outsourcing only selected parts of the business processes to the cloud and running other parts on-premise—SAP S/4HANA ensures flexibility. Since its introduction in 2015, more than 6,300 customers have chosen SAP S/4HANA. In 2017, the central question for our customers is no longer if they migrate to SAP S/4HANA but how to perform the migration to gain the maximum benefit from it.

This book describes the different operating models and the migration scenarios to SAP S/4HANA in detail. We hope to enable readers to assess the corresponding scenarios and thus plan their migration to SAP S/4HANA more efficiently. In the context of the various SAP S/4HANA migration scenarios, we’ll illustrate different options for defining your own pace for the migration and thus protecting the investments made into your existing system landscape.

Sven Denecken
Senior Vice President and Chief Product Owner for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Rudolf Hois
Vice President and Chief Product Owner for SAP S/4HANA, On-Premise