How to manage SAP transformations with proven strategies and tools

SAP landscape transformation challenges

Recent years have seen a significant increase in international mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, and major organizational restructurings. While these changes often benefit shareholders, they can pose substantial challenges for SAP business applications. Major changes must be mirrored in the company’s organization, business processes, and ultimately in the data within SAP systems.

For 30 years, we have specialized in implementing migrations and data transformations in SAP landscapes. As a certified SAP partner, we have deep expertise in implementing a wide array of transformation scenarios. In this blog post, we share our experiences and best practices from projects like these to streamline your SAP transformation journey.

Differences between the greenfield approach and system landscape transformation

Adapting SAP business applications to transformation requirements, such as carving out a business unit, is complex. One approach is to utilize SAP’s onboard functionality through a greenfield approach, which involves creating new customizations, setting up new organizational units (e.g. plants and company codes), migrating open items, and extending master data.

This greenfield approach requires waiting for a key date to implement the changes, such as the start of a new period or fiscal year. Coupled with a key date-dependent migration of open items only, this waiting period can significantly impact business users, interrupting business processes, creating incomplete document flows, and making data hard to find due to new numbering systems. Reporting can also become cumbersome when comparing year-to-year data.

Another approach is to use a landscape transformation tool such as SNP’s CrystalBridge to overcome these limitations by transforming existing data. At SNP, we have pooled 30 years of transformation knowledge in the form of migration content and guided procedures in our solutions. The resulting benefits include:

• No key date dependency
• Historical data, customizing, master data, and open items can be converted
• Minimized impact on business users
• Reporting integrity
• Possibility of near-zero downtime (NZDT)

SNP’s landscape transformation solutions

We provide advanced solutions for SAP landscape transformation by leveraging our CrystalBridge platform and BLUEFIELD approach. These tools offer a comprehensive suite for data transformation and migration, allowing for faster, safer, and more cost-effective transitions to SAP S/4HANA and other environments.

Key benefits of SNP’s solutions

• CrystalBridge platform: Our data management tool for analyzing, archiving, restructuring, and migrating data securely and quickly to new systems or cloud environments. It supports various scenarios, including post-merger integrations, business restructurings, and cloud migrations​.
• BLUEFIELD approach: This method combines the best of both greenfield and brownfield approaches, enabling a selective data transition to SAP S/4HANA while preserving historical data and minimizing disruptions​.
• Guided procedures bundle best practices and guide you through complex migration, upgrade, or data transformation projects.
• Low downtime: Our solutions scale very well with large data volumes and can even implement downtime minimization and near-zero downtime. 
• Comprehensive transformation services: We offer solutions for mergers and acquisitions, carve-outs, divestitures, automated data validation, cloud data integration, data governance, and more. Our tools ensure data accuracy and integrity throughout the transformation process​.
• Completeness: Our solutions include a migration validation tool that automates and heavily accelerates completeness validation. It also ensures (as well as documents!) the fundamental correctness of the migration by comparing the data in source and target environments in terms of running record counts, field-level validations, foreign key checks, SAP standard reports such as balance sheet or cost center actuals, and many more.
• Lean system landscapes: Above and beyond data migration, our software portfolio helps to shrink systems before a migration through archiving and keep them lean and efficient after the migration. A dedicated component allows for application retirement in case of selective migrations, allowing you to run a lean system landscape without old display-only systems.

Why choose SNP for your SAP transformation

Our solutions not only cover the technical aspects of SAP transformations but also focus on business agility and compliance. This comprehensive approach ensures that your SAP landscape transformation is aligned with your business goals, resulting in a seamless transition with minimal operational disruption​.