Enable, Thrive and Exceed Expectations of Your SAP S/4HANA Migration with MDM

Businesses everywhere are on a path to S4/HANA, SAP’s newest, most innovative platform, with thousands more businesses yet to follow. To stay within standard support, customers need to make this transition by 2027 (or 2030 for those opting to pay an additional 2% for extended support).

For some, the journey will take years; the most complex migrations may take a decade, or more. This is particularly true for large multinationals that achieved scale through a mix of organic growth and M&A. The result is a patchwork of siloed ERP systems, fueled by an inconsistent mix of supplier, material and customer master data management (MDM) solutions, procedures and processes. 

All of this can make moving to SAP S/4HANA® a time-consuming, expensive and risky undertaking, consisting of many challenges related to migration preparation and implementation, such as: 

• Determining the type of migration takes extensive planning, many stakeholders’ time and increased costs 

• When considering a hybrid (selective data transition) migration, increased complexity needs to be managed in reengineering and systems conversions 
• While green field migrations ensure higher rates of adoption, they take far longer, cost considerably more and require significant change management 
• In contrast, brown field migrations have fewer costs and shorter implementation time frames but frequently have lower success rates, as the migrations carry over inefficiencies, technical debt and take much longer to fully leverage the S/4HANA capabilities 

Take control of migration with a flexible, independent MDM solution 

MDM is typically implemented to support an existing technology landscape and solve particular pain points, like a single source of truth for product information. It also often follows the transition to a new ERP system. However, many have discovered that leading off that process with MDM can yield critical, substantial benefits, especially if the platform is independent of the ERP systems with the flexibility to provide governance over them all. 

STEP is built to support a flexible, extensible data model that is agnostic to any specific ERP solution’s structure. For companies planning their path to S4/HANA, it provides a dramatically different and more cost-effective option, enabling them to not only mitigate risk, but to continue to thrive and reap a range of additional benefits while preparing their data for the migration process. 

While one might assume vendor-specific ERP data governance tools can do this too, they are more likely to find that supporting a diverse vendor, geographic and operational landscape this way requires costly, unsustainable customization, if it’s feasible at all. 

Supporting data quality and governance throughout the migration process 

STEP provides a flexible configurable data model to accommodate both common and esoteric ERP sources of master data. Linking multiple record structures for the same customer or supplier enables synchronization with legacy systems, as well as generating golden records for S/4HANA, adding governance workflows where the data can be managed through a stewardship process. After configuring relevant data models, automated match and merge can be done within/across record sources, followed by subject matter expert review below a match confidence threshold. The result is turned into a golden record for the destination system. 

This continuous improvement approach mitigates many of the typical deficiencies of static conversions, such as “what happens next” as the pace of business marches on. As new customers, suppliers and materials keep coming in, there will be ongoing demand for deduplication to ensure data remains consistent across legacy systems and incremental S/4HANA deployments. These constant changes carry significant risk and require continuous data governance beyond the migration efforts, including laborious, error-prone duplicate data entry across both new and legacy systems. This also avoids ERP-specific governance tools entailing extensive code. With Stibo Systems, changes to source data can be managed automatically through business rules or workflows by subject matter experts. 

Delivering short-term value while paving the way to long-term success

STEP can improve data quality and enable business value throughout the migration process, long before deployment of S/4HANA is complete. Enabling business leaders to address questions like: “Who is our biggest customer or supplier?” or “What percentage of purchases are made with our global negotiated discount?” With a diverse ERP landscape, such questions can be problematic—or even impossible—to answer, except within a particular geography, business unit or single ERP system. 

With a single trusted source of customer, supplier and material information, users can definitively answer these questions—and then leverage that information to focus more on key customers, negotiate more effectively with suppliers and monitor contract compliance. By better knowing their customers, businesses can grow their top line; by having a 360° view of their suppliers, they can negotiate better discounts. And with a global view of materials, purchases can be made at negotiated prices to reduce costs and improve the bottom line. 

Of course, when the journey to S/4HANA is complete, there will be many other benefits. But there is no reason to delay driving business value when you have STEP implemented for the short term, too.