Unsuccessful Migration or Consolidation Risks

Unsuccessful migration or consolidation risks

The risks of an unsuccessful migration or consolidation may be incorrect or incomplete data, business processes or inaccurate reports-all of which can lead to significant impact on business continuity. After SAP migrations and consolidations occur, companies most commonly run into the following types of issues: missing feature functionality (reported by users), poor performance (reported by users) and compliance issues (reported by the compliance team).

Typically, this occurs because consolidation projects focus on transactional business processes and functional requirements. Attention and focus should be paid to other aspects as well, such as the following four:

1. Affected user roles/personas, modeled and re-created in the consolidated environment so no business process or function is missed

2. Reporting and business warehouse requirements for the consolidated business process

3. Performance planning, modeling and testing in the consolidated environment

4. Post-implementation support planning for the new business processes

In this article, I will introduce new approaches to dramatically improve specific areas of migration and consolidation, custom code management, testing and post-implementation processes. If these techniques are used appropriately, companies can see the following three benefits: cost of migration and consolidation reduced by 50 percent, program risk lowered by 40 percent, and program time compressed by 40 percent.

The new techniques I will discuss here will help companies to accelerate SAP migrations and consolidations without loss of business process and application performance or business process integrity. These techniques should be part of all migration and consolidation programs.