SAP users struggling with data management for S/4HANA migration The majority of UK and Ireland SAP users are finding a lack of preparedness in data management is affecting migrations from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA and/or a push towards automating business processes. According to a survey of 116 SAP user organizations, 61 percent said that data management challenges have slowed or will …
Years ago, I did set up a SAP archiving platform, with was working well.
The only issue is it never was used as a way to archive SAP data, only to link non-SAP data to SAP, lol.
It was attributed, back then, to SAP data owners lazyness. Couldn't be bothered to properly tier SAP data.
Why does the FTSE percieve SAP as a good thing?
Turgid, ill designed, incompatible with itself never mind outside, expensive, slow, lacking functionality one actually wants... Yep, it's checks the boxes for an ERP.
a recent migration here took 4 months just to get cost codes set up and a 3 day outage. I suppose it does act as a job creation scheme.
This is always a business issue. Bob from accounts insisting 15 year old data has to be online and nearline is not good enough. Because he has to run that 15 year old badly written report, despite the fact the data already exists in that expensive Data warehouse and analytics tool.
Always in the too hard to break through the politics bracket.
So some years ago, you moved your ERP to a SAP application on the basis, among other supposed benefits, of having all your enterprise data consolidated in a single database. That would have make it much easier to mange and report. And of course, your ERP vendor should take care of future upgrades.
Now SAP is offering you an "upgrade" to a supposedly much more faster and efficient database platform (HANA). However, SAP is not automatically moving your data from the existing database to the new database. Also, you have what appears to be too much data for your new, remember, faster and more efficient platform, to digest.
So exactly what was the benefit of moving to SAP in the first place? Specially if you neither have an automated migration path to new versions nor the same database capacity and scalability in the new versions?
well, the type of tables is very different in Hana compared to the classic SAP. In the past, at every system upgrade, the so-called reports XPRAs were being run to complete upgrade of system. There are migration reports to Hana, but an SAP system is normally mightily expanded and enhanced. So it is unrealistic to expect that the additional (enhanced) data will be taken over the Hana automatically.
Even if the migration would be fully automatic, you'd still need months to prepare the migration. Just because you'll need to test that everything still works in the new system (and prepare and execute a strategy for it). Just because it's a new DB behind and because everybody loves their own data.
mmmm... so HANA does not handle well tables of a type that 60% of customers have. That HANA is designed that way speaks volumes about how much SAP disregards its customers's needs.
On the rest of the points, I agree, no migration of such data volumes and complexity is ever going to be easy. What is unusual here is how your own product handicaps the migration by its very own features. It is usually a sign that migration is not a good idea in the first place.
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