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The big news this month was the historic announcement of SAP S/4HANA (see replay of launch event here). This is the successor to SAP R/3 which was launched on July 6th 1992 and helped kicked off the ERP era that has dominated the application marketplace for the last 23 years. Now according to Gartner we are entering the “Postmodern ERP World”. Due to the increased need for businesses to support digital process transformation, enterprises are moving to a hybrid environment of on premise and cloud based applications. This hybrid approach enables business to retain value from their existing IT investment while expanding into the on-line digital world characterized by social, mobile and analytics.

So how does this “Postmodern ERP World” impact SAP customers? SAP has committed to its HANA platform as the future for its innovation roadmap arguing that the next generation business processes require an in-memory platform to order to simplify existing landscapes and provide real time data processing and analytics. As Hasso Plattner (SAP Chairman) mentioned at the launch, "If this doesn’t work, we’re dead. Flat-out dead. It’s that simple”.

This means that if you are looking to adopt SAP’s new innovations, such as SAP Simple Finance, you will have to upgrade your core ECC systems to SAP S/4HANA which requires an upgrade to EHP6 and a migration from your existing database to HANA. This will also require a plan on how to deploy the new environment while retaining value of your existing infrastructure. Lastly you will have adapt your support processes and skills to manage this new environment which may include cloud based applications.

In order to evaluate your future strategy the next step is to perform a detailed impact analysis to help answer the following questions:

  • What are the key areas of business value? Simplification, Finance, Analytics, User Experience, Mobile etc
  • How much of my existing infrastructure can I re-use? Existing servers, storage, LAN vs Cloud
  • What will be required to support the future state architecture? Upgrades, integration, user access, monitoring etc

Having a strategic roadmap will help your business navigate its way to value in this new “Postmodern ERP World”.

EGI’s – North America Schedule for March 2015:

To view Online schedule for Expert Guided Implementation sessions  select all delivery methods and use the "Region" search filter to refine the search results:

  Meet the Expert (1 hour presentation):

North America Schedule for April 2015:

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