Five keys to a successful SAP migration on AWS

This is a guest post written by Alan Manuel, Chief Product Officer, Protera Technologies.

Regardless of industry, your customers have more choices than ever. To stay competitive you must meet their needs more quickly, more accurately, and with higher quality.

If your business runs SAP, you’re considering a comprehensive approach to meet these needs:

1. Implementing new functionality offered by SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA to enable the modern business process that your customers require.
2. Executing your digital transformation strategy to unlock innovation and increase agility.
3. A continuous improvement plan to improve service levels, reduce costs, and stay current with SAP’s support plans.

Migrating your SAP to the cloud, in a process called SAP transformation, is the first step that many customers take towards implementing this approach.

​Before sharing tips on successfully migrating SAP on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we’ll share the experience of a company who has already made this transformation.

Joerns Healthcare migrates to SAP HANA on AWS

Joerns Healthcare is an international supplier and service provider in post-acute care. They have a suite of advanced injury and wound prevention, patient care and handling products, and professional services and programs. Joerns Healthcare receives orders 24x7x365, with 80% needing to be fulfilled the same day – within 24 to two hours.

“We had to be able to adapt to the faster growth we were experiencing, provide more stability for our SAP systems, and provide the business with real-time actionable data,” explains CIO Jeff Sadtler.

Joerns Healthcare supports customers across the United States, with 130 warehouses, 675 vehicles, and 650 field technicians. They decided to upgrade from ECC 6 to Suite on HANA for the real-time analytics to support their time sensitive business model. Joerns Healthcare selected AWS for the speed, scalability, and reliability in supporting the evolving needs of their business and customers.

“We were able to achieve all these goals and reduce our spend significantly enough to pull forth the next phase of our transformation, which is SAP Field Service Management,” says Sadtler.

To hear more of the Joerns Healthcare story, including lessons learned, watch the webinar.

Five Keys to SAP Transformation Success on AWS

We learned through experiences like that of Joerns Healthcare and other customer engagements that there are five keys to SAP transformation success on AWS.

Key 1: Understand your technical options

If you are like most customers, your SAP Transformation journey begins by understanding your technical options.

The first key to success is learning what options are available for you—and what might pose a risk—within your technical environment. This includes your current cloud capabilities, analytics, and existing systems.

Make sure that you:

• Find out whether your existing operating system and database is supported in the cloud
• Check your SAP kernel version and SAP basis version
• Determine interdependencies with your SAP- and non-SAP systems
• Select the right target architecture based upon SAP requirements and AWS offerings

Key 2: Assess your functional environment

The goal here is to determine how your users’ business processes changes, and how that change impacts your systems.

That’s because while cloud-based environments, including AWS and SAP, can bring new capabilities to optimize and improve support for modern business environments. These changes may also impact business processes and functions.

In this step:

• Prioritize remediation of your simplification items
• Check which functions or processes are no longer compatible in S/4HANA
• Check SAP custom code and SAP Fiori apps

To learn about the remaining three keys, we invite you to watch the on-demand webinar “The Five Keys to SAP Transformation Success.”