This article summarizes key insights on accelerating ERP (SAP) consolidation post-merger from a recent episode of the Enterprise Thought Leadership Podcast. Podcast host Tim Bond, Founder of TechPros.io interviewed Tyler Constable, Global Head of Solution Engineering at Avantra, who discussed learnings from a TechPros.io roundtable challenge on the same topic. Post the event, Constable shared perspectives from his discussion with Mukund Shinde, Client Partner at TCS on pragmatic approaches to standardizing platforms while managing risk.
Companies regularly acquire other companies, resulting in a fragmented SAP landscape. There is pressure to rapidly consolidate and migrate acquired companies onto a single global SAP platform like SAP S/4HANA to enable standard processes and data. However, SAP migration projects are complex, risky, and take significant time and resources.
The key challenge is how to accelerate SAP consolidation during M&A while managing risk.
Balancing priorities in SAP consolidations
As Tyler Constable noted, there are inherent trade-offs between quality, timelines and budget that must be balanced in major SAP consolidation initiatives following M&A activity. He highlighted that every SAP system is unique so there is no one size fits all template.
This is where AI-driven observability and automation solutions like Avantra can contribute to more effective decision-making by providing deep visibility into system metrics, benchmarks and predictive insights.
The importance of landscape architecture
Mukund Shinde, Client Partner at TCS, strongly emphasized assessing the broader landscape architecture and total cost of ownership trade-offs early when planning SAP consolidation roadmaps. Key considerations include whether to maintain some applications on-premise or shift entirely to the cloud, how to optimize performance and availability requirements, and ensuring the landscape aligns with overall business growth strategies. Shinde explained:
“You have many options to evaluate at this stage. It is important to decide the optimal landscape in a cost-effective way that also supports the larger business strategy and growth plans.”
Leveraging templates to accelerate
In terms of accelerating analysis, Shinde advocated leveraging templates around master data, key configurations, security policies and testing scripts. He noted:
“Rather than take a greenfield approach that starts from scratch, companies can minimize impact by leveraging existing templates from the parent company that can be expanded for the new company. This standardization helps reduce risk and total costs.”
Take an MVP approach
In terms of prioritizing processes, Shinde advocated an MVP methodology focused on the most critical business areas first:
“During workshops, finance processes can be categorized into most critical, nice to have and future state. This allows the team to focus first on integrating essential finance processes with similarities across companies.”
The role of regular upgrades
Besides data migration, Shinde emphasized the need to regularly upgrade underlying applications, databases and infrastructure as part of multi-year SAP consolidation programs. He advised having separate project testing landscapes and leveraging test automation tools to analyze change impacts across domains:
“You need to consider the holistic picture of change, including applications, infrastructure, business processes, people and more. An integrated approach is key.”
Augmenting decisions with AIOps
According to Constable, Avantra's AIOps capabilities can significantly enhance landscape decisions around what remains on legacy systems versus shifts to the cloud by providing predictive visibility into workloads, consumption patterns and performance benchmarks between source and target systems.
He said:
“First, we need to have intelligence on the actual target system and its operations and its predictions for what adding those additional workloads would do...Then you start to look at the source system, that system where we're going to get that data from, and you start to get an idea as to what those workloads might look like as they are today.”
Combining these current and forward-looking insights facilitates more accurate architecture planning.
Streamlining testing with automation
In preparing for migration, Constable explained how Avantra's automation capabilities can accelerate testing by quickly standing up environments, transferring test data and tearing down landscapes to reimport updated test data. He stated:
“The testing process is going to rely on feedback as well, and this needs to include qualitative and quantitative data. So having an automation solution in place that can help move the testing data is going to be critical in reducing the amount of hours the team needs to put in for manual testing efforts.”
Such automation drives efficiencies while enabling more testing iterations to build confidence.
People empowering potential
A key theme was freeing up skilled SAP teams from day-to-day operational tasks so they can focus on delivering strategic initiatives related to mergers and acquisitions. As Shinde noted, many M&A scenarios are time-bound with specific regulatory deadlines to close transactions. This results in intense pressure on SAP teams to rapidly consolidate very different technology landscapes. The goal is enabling them to shift more attention to value-add merger activities rather than daily firefighting.
Likewise, Constable explained a driving benefit of Avantra’s AIOps platform is reducing inefficient manual efforts so skilled engineers can drive growth programs instead of being bogged down in daily issues. He said:
“This gives them the opportunity to focus on strategic initiatives again like we're talking about today here with acquisitions. So these are around S/4HANA planning, migrations, cloud strategies, RISE strategies, digital transformation, all of these things.”
The path ahead with AI and automation
In closing, AIOps solutions offer pragmatic ways for organizations to accelerate multi-year SAP consolidation initiatives, reduce risk, standardize faster and empower teams to focus on driving growth versus maintenance. While every company context differs, the principle of balancing business priorities with technology capabilities holds true. Planning must still occur iteratively but can be enhanced by intelligent tools. And automation presents a compelling lever for improving agility, resilience and productivity.
By taking advantage of advances in AI/ML, RPA and other exponential technologies, enterprise leaders can transform fragmented application landscapes into unified digital platforms, unlocking innovation and significant value.
Avantra AIOps Workshops
Avantra is offering complimentary AIOps workshops to help SAP leaders baseline their operational maturity, identify gaps hindering team productivity and uncover automation opportunities. It is a simple two-hour workshop which allows Avantra to dig into business critical KPIs to find areas of observability that can be enhanced and explore where automations can be put in place for quick ROIs..."It's really an exciting opportunity to get ahead for 2024 and learn which gaps you might be able to fill in the smooth running of SAP operations." Constable remarked.
While intended for SAP leaders, these workshops are available beyond just consolidation scenarios to any organization leveraging SAP solutions that wants to accelerate their business transformation. For any enterprise running SAP, it represents an opportunity to assess current states, pinpoint friction points slowing teams, and spotlight intelligent automation potential to drive efficiencies.
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