Hello, and thanks for spending some time reading this blog post. I’m a member of the SAP S/4HANA RIG (Regional Implementation Group), and as I mentioned in my previous blog
SAP S/4HANA Functional Innovations documented by the S/4HANA RIG team, one of our goals is to share our accumulated SAP S/4HANA knowledge with the extended SAP community using a variety of channels. We have found that blog posts and openSAP courses can be a very effective way to massively share content. For this reason, as of now we have published more than 600 blogs and have delivered several openSAP courses.
In this blog post, I have consolidated the assets that we have created related to the two most important functional activities you should consider before you start your system conversion project. Aligning with SAP Activate, the activities I am about to describe must be handled during the
PREPARE phase of your system conversion from SAP ERP system to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition (or On-premise).
If you are not familiar with the SAP Activate phases, my recommendation is to begin by first watching the videos contained within the following blog:
SAP Activate in under 9 minutes
As described in Roadmap Viewer, during
DISCOVER phase one of the outcomes of the activity
Conversion Readiness assessment is a list of pre-projects to be executed before starting the system conversion. From a functional perspective, there are two topics that SAP experts recommend always include as part of those pre-projects: Synchronization of Customers/Vendors into Business partners (CVI), and Reconciliation of the Financial Data.
The primary reason why you should include these topics is because sometimes it is not easy to estimate the time you may need for these tasks. Therefore, if you decide to perform those activities as part of your system conversion project (and not before), you could find that the synchronization or remediation activities may take longer than expected, impacting your project timeline.
Let me share with you the assets our team has put together to help to carry out these pre-conversion projects:
Synchronization of Customers/Vendors into Business partners (CVI)
As you may be aware, in SAP S/4HANA the leading mandatory technical object for customers and vendors is the Business Partner. To ensure a successful system conversion, all Customers, Vendors, and Contact Persons must be converted into Business Partners in the SAP ERP System before starting the technical conversion of the system.
SAP experts recommend using a Sandbox system (which is a recent copy of your productive system) for the pre-project evaluation of CVI/BP Synchronization.
You can find the information you need to execute this pre-conversion project in the following assets:
Additionally, you can also review the following blog posts:
Transport-based correction instructions (TCIs)
CVI cockpit
Merge Customer and Vendor into a Single Business Partner
Business Data Toolset (BDT)
Data cleansing and preparation
Custom features
Once you have successfully completed the synchronization in your sandbox system, you must perform all the same master data corrections in your productive system. By using this approach, you will already have identified, and know how to efficiently correct, the same issues in your productive source system before your system conversion project.
Reconciliation of Financial Data
Before initiating a system conversion to SAP S/4HANA, it is crucial to address any Finance data inconsistency within the source SAP ECC system. There are different reasons that can cause discrepancies in Finance data and the remediation could be a back-and-forth process, becoming a time-consuming activity.
To mitigate any potential impact on the project timeline, an early detection and correction process is key for a successful system conversion project.
Some examples of root causes of data inconsistencies are:
- Inconsistencies caused by hardware defects (e.g. corrupt blocks)
- Wrong data management strategy (e.g. deletion of wrong data, archiving of FI data of the current fiscal year)
- Improper customizing changes (without respecting warning messages).
While some fixes can be executed automatically by SAP tools, others may require raising incident messages to SAP Support. Moreover, If the remediation activities produce changes in account balances, those need to be carefully documented for control and audit purposes.
As with the CVI pre-project, SAP experts recommend using a Sandbox system (a recent copy of your productive system) to determine any required corrections. You can obtain the information required for the execution of these pre-conversion activities and reports from the following resources.
General Ledger
Material ledger
Assets accounting
Funds management
Cross finance assets
I hope this blog post was helpful for you. If so, click on “like” or “share”. I’m looking forward to your feedback and comments. If you have any questions, I encourage you to post into the Q&A using the tags:
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition and
SAP S/4HANA. We will try to answer all your inquiries as soon as possible.
Thanks to the RIG team for this great content. and also thanks to
sheldon.edelstein chelliah.soundar,
betty.guedez2,
monicareyes990 for your contribution to the creation of this blog!.
Thanks,
Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG team.
