S/4HANA preparedness – The implications of a comprehensive integration strategy

It’s true that an ERP is only as effective as its integration with business processes, partners and systems. So why then did Gartner predict that “Through 2025, 40% of ERP implementations will underachieve as a result of underinvestment in integration?”

You may be thinking SAP has the answer, with SAP Integration Suite. For some scenarios it will be the best option. However, solution readiness, total cost, resource requirements and availability, as well as life expectancy, all need careful evaluation.

Another option is that you might be able to just adapt your current integration systems. But, with hundreds if not thousands of individual business processes to update, it is important to understand what the effort is likely to be. Will test and re-work cycles cause unacceptable project delay and impact customer goodwill? Will the existing technologies support APIs or will they be looking like expensive legacy systems by the time of go-live? These systems probably already have a technical debt. By the time the business is live on S/4HANA this could be an alarming technical deficit which would directly limit the contribution that S/4HANA can make.

Digital transformation has been driving change and modernisation for years. More recently, Brexit, Covid, the shift towards e-commerce and even S/4HANA itself have all accelerated the pressure to adopt newer integration patterns. Organisations need to be mindful of this changing landscape and be ready with a technology strategy that seeks to minimise the disruption of introducing S/4HANA rather than being delayed by it with a potentially significant adverse business impact.

In this webinar Seeburger will relate experience from over 50 S/4HANA projects and discuss why this topic is not as straightforward as it seems. They will also look at strategies to decouple the ERP from the integration layer. Effectively implemented, this approach will benefit the business by:

• Maximising the ultimate effectiveness of S/4HANA with agile and deep integration to business processes and early payback
• Mitigating risk and reducing the duration of an S/4HANA implementation project
• Reducing cost of S/4HANA implementation and ongoing run costs
• Minimising disruption + extended change freezes
• Extending the life of legacy applications

With more than 35 years in integration technology, Seeburger is trusted by over 10,000 customers globally. As the first vendor to achieve SAP certification, there’s not much about integrating SAP systems that SEEBURGER doesn’t know.

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Seeburger simplifies complex connections between clouds, applications and people, so you can focus on what matters. Share business-critical data. Make split-second decisions. Operate at scale. Seeburger Integration accelerates business at the speed of now.