Accelerate Your SAP S/4HANA Migration to AWS and Utilize Nearly 50 Years of IBM’s SAP Experience

By Naeem Asghar, Sr. Partner Solution Architect – AWS
By Vamsi Yanamadala, Sr. Partner Solution Architect – AWS
By Zoe Tomkins, Principle Partner Development Manager – AWS
By Jasbir Singh, IBM Global Lead, Accelerated Move Centre (AMC) – IBM

IBM

This post explains the challenges faced by customers running SAP ECC environments on premises and how IBM can accelerate their S/4 HANA transformation journey to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

IBM Accelerated Move Centre (AMC) delivers a cost-effective approach to SAP S/4HANA transformations:

• Migrate and modernize at your own pace, adopting new technologies with accelerators that meet the specific requirements of your organization.
• Utilize existing investments by preserving proven business processes and data models.
• Reduce costs and time-to-ROI by minimizing upfront investments in new infrastructure.
• Embrace cloud innovations by quickly leveraging new AWS technologies with minimal change to your existing business.

IBM is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with 10 AWS Competencies including the AWS SAP Competency and 13 AWS service validations.

IBM also participates in AWS Partner programs such as AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which offsets the migration costs of cloud adoption for customers and accelerates migration with additional AWS resources.

Customer Success Story

Customers face challenges when migrating and modernizing legacy SAP systems, and that was the case for a large process manufacturing company based in India which was experiencing issues with old hardware due for a refresh.

This included 13 years of legacy data, old versions of Oracle DB, complex interfaces and customer objects, performance issues with ABAP objects, material requirement planning, and Batch Management functionality for finished goods that was not performant.

The IBM Accelerated Move Centre (AMC) solution is a brownfield transformation to SAP S/4 HANA in a single step. By utilizing this solution, IBM was able to migrate the customer to SAP S/4HANA quickly and efficiently, while also upgrading Solution Manager and activating Batch Management to monitor and track finished goods.

The customer saw 100% capital cost avoidance on new on-premises infrastructure, 30% faster application response times for business users, shorter approval duration to due to workflow implementation, overall data footprint reduction, and an overall reduction in storage costs.

The organization was also able to automate 85% of their data conversion processes during the SAP transformation. To learn more, read the full case study.

The Solution

IBM and AWS have the experience and knowledge to streamline complex SAP migrations and enable organizations to fully leverage the breadth of AWS tools and services that modernize SAP workloads.

AWS is the most reliable cloud to run your SAP workloads, providing the longest track record of cloud success and supporting more than 5,000 active SAP customers. Get the assistance you need to execute migrations, undergo transformation, or improve how you run SAP by leveraging IBM and their proven expertise.

With AWS, businesses can confidently run SAP systems with SAP-certified infrastructure that can support even the most demanding HANA-based production deployments.

Together, IBM and AWS offer a practical and cost-effective process for transformations to SAP S/4HANA, pre-scoped to fit your business requirements and drive future adoption of innovative SAP solutions.

Figure 1 – Accelerated S/4 HANA conversion with AWS services.

1. Design the AWS landing zone based on security and compliance needs of the customer.
2. Deploy the landing zone as infrastructure as code (IaC) with AWS CloudFormation.
3. Size out SAP system based on SAP HANA Sizing and business needs.
4. Understand and design high availability and disaster recovery (DR) requirements based recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.
5. Utilize the AWS Launch Wizard for SAP to deploy the SAP S/4 HANA target system in just over two hours.
6. Start Software Update Manager (SUM) with the system update and database migration process.
7. Finish the system update and database migration procedure on the target system.
8. Install and configure the AWS Backint Agent to manage and save SAP HANA backups to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). AWS Backint Agent is SAP-certified and integrates with SAP management tools.
9. Configure the SAP HANA database with Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights to monitor the health of your of the HANA database.

IBM AMC is a next-generation factory migration solution designed to migrate and modernize SAP landscapes to SAP S/4HANA on AWS with pre-scoped solutions to fit the specific requirements of each business and its SAP S/4HANA transformation goals.

Keeping in line with customer requirements and market trends, the IBM AMC solution is pre-scoped into T-shirt sizes to accommodate all types of customers. Each T-shirt size comes with a pre-defined system architecture, delivery model, and project plan.

Figure 2 – Pre-scoped T-shirt sizes.

Regardless of the T-shirt size, all IBM AMC projects are scoped with basis and security, development, functional, and testing capabilities.

IBM AMC has developed key differentiators with their tooling and accelerators, including:

• IBM’s HANAtization console that identifies custom objects for code remediation and saves up to 60% of manual effort.
• IBM Finance Reconciliation tool which allows the execution of pre- and post-reports for general ledger, vendor, customer, and cost center including assets.
• IBM Stock Reconciliation tool which assists in stock reconciliation after the SAP HANA conversion and covers all types of stock locations, including both managed and split valuated stock.

These tools have been assessed by SAP and declared as market differentiators and help reduce project timelines and costs, while ensuring business continuity.

The value proposition to customers is quantifiable. With benchmarks based on different projects starting from the preparation phase, actual execution of the project, and then moving to the new system.

Some of the benefits realized are:

• Automation for code remediation to reduce project timelines.
• Downtime reduction using reconciliation tools.
• Reduction of preparatory work and time through tools in finance and master data.
• Reduction of time in managed fixes and code changes, reducing effort needed by maintenance teams.

Figure 3 – IBM tooling value proposition.

The IBM AMC offering also supports RISE with SAP, a business transformation as a service to help clients shift to the intelligent enterprise.

SAP Digital Transformation with IBM

IBM AMC is a central part of the strategic evolution partnership between IBM and SAP. As a global leader in SAP transformations, IBM offers in-depth industry and process experience to make your business smarter.

Together with SAP, IBM and AWS can help make your digital transformation a reality, bringing intelligence to your entire enterprise.

IBM’s benefits include:

• Industry innovation focused on integrated and intelligent processes leveraging IBM and SAP industry best practices to reimagine operational excellence and drive new business value.
• Experience management to reimagine customer and employee experiences by capitalizing on built-in industry intelligent workflows.
• Data transformation using SAP solutions to help you transform data into trusted business value and a reference architecture to build intelligent cloud solutions.
• Roadmap development for private deployments of SAP Cloud Platform with IBM Red Hat OpenShift.

Figure 4 – IBM’s experience and benefits.

Post deployment, there are several AWS services available to help automate DevOps-based management for SAP.

IBM delivers this automation for infrastructure provisioning, SAP installation including SAP clusters by leveraging AWS Launch Wizard, auto scaling, SAP kernel patch automation, HANA upgrades using AWS Systems Manager, and monitoring SAP systems via Amazon CloudWatch.

To learn more, see the Get Started with SAP on AWS page.

Conclusion

IBM provides the experience, tooling, methodology, and best practices to streamline your SAP transformation, combining SAP S/4HANA conversion and migration to AWS in a single step using the IBM’s Accelerated Move Centre (AMC).

IBM has nearly 50 years of experience in the industry, where no other SAP partner has more Global Partner Program Certifications. IBM has also completed over 6,500 SAP projects including hundreds of SAP S/4HANA implementations.

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IBM – AWS Partner Spotlight

IBM is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and MSP that offers comprehensive service capabilities addressing both business and technology challenges that clients face today.

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