flagship project – First SAP Customer to use selective data transition
SPS Steel and Pipe Supply, an american steel company, established in 1933, successfully completes Go-Live on their SAP S/4HANA flagship project, SPS/4WARD in record time. After a 10 months technical project timeline, cbs Corporate Business Solutions America finalized the handover of the productive system back to SPS without any business disruptions. Through this project, SPS becomes the first company to use Selective Data Transition to migrate selective data and processes from an ECC 6.0 on-premise system into an existing SAP S/4HANA Single Tenant Edition private Cloud environment based on SAP Best Practices.
SPS established new standards in short time, implemented digital innovations on a selective basis and migrated their entire company to a new S/4 platform in only a few months. “What was achieved this weekend has never been done before” says Johannes Semel, Sr. Practice Director at cbs who served as project manager through this flagship project. He continues, “this project proves that Selective Data Transition offers more flexibility to customers looking to migrate into the cloud.” SPS/4WARD will pave the way for hundreds of SAP customers looking to leverage next generation technologies at the enterprise level by hosting their entire SAP infrastructure in the cloud. “This project is pioneering and groundbreaking. It demonstrates that S/4 transformation projects do not have to take years and that they can genuinely add value to the business. This project will serve as a blueprint for future S/4 migrations into the cloud,” emphasizes Lorenz Praefcke, CEO of cbs America.
Blueprint for future S/4HANA migrations
This was not a normal SAP S/4HANA transition project, and many SAP customer will find similarities in the hurdles faced by SPS in their own transformation journeys. Not only did SPS move from on-premise to the cloud, they also:
- Left years of old, obsolete data behind
- Renamed company codes
- Merged into an existing SAP S/4HANA Cloud landscape
- Harmonized chart of accounts
- Changed to account-based controlling
- Switched from Classic to NewGL in ACDOCA
- Implemented specific new S/4 functionalities
“All these puzzle pieces by themselves are daunting, challenging and largely impossible to be carried out simultaneously without Selective Data Transition”, Johannes Semel claims.
SPS Companies opted for the Selective Data Transition approach with cbs because they wanted to move the current ECC system without many changes. However, on the way there they found out that an SAP System Conversion (Brownfield) would not be feasible due to technical restrictions and the planned merge with an SAP S/4HANA instance in the cloud. “Selective Data Transition was the ideal approach for our project” Justin Moldrup, IT Director with SPS Companies says. “We could have never moved to SAP S/4HANA and merge the two systems the way we did. This approach was a game changer for us – and it worked out great. We are extremely happy with the result.” The far-reaching advantages for SPS are obvious: a new digital architecture, a modern financial structure, optimized transparency, harmonized systems, maintenance security, future viability, and standardized and accelerated business processes.
New approach cuts transition time up to 50 percent
Selective Data Transition is a unique, software-driven SAP S/4HANA transformation approach cutting project implementation time by up to 50 percent. It solves the binary choice between New Implementation and System Conversion by adding a flexible, data-driven, and business focused alternative for SAP customers across industries. cbs is a founding member of SAP’s Selective Data Transition Engagement, a select community of partners responsible for pioneering this approach, and establishing standard procedures for the execution of complex landscape transformation projects.
