If you move to SAP S/4HANA without tackling your data, you’re adding a lot of complexity and cost to your transformation.
I see this all the time: organisations spend millions on S/4HANA licences and infrastructure, but skip the unglamorous work of data volume management. The result? Oversized HANA boxes, more complex projects with longer test cycles and painful surprises in year-two cloud bills.
This newsletter is a practical walkthrough of how to think about data and sizing for your S/4HANA journey.
The SAP Activate methodology for a transition to S/4HANA, is a fantastic guide for a program. It mentions the analyses one should do in the Discover and Prepare phases.
Which includes – running a “Usage and Data Profiling” Analyses.
Identify data you don’t need in S/4HANA (old logs, obsolete transactional data, unused master data).
Top Tip:
Don’t forget to analyse current and historical organisational models – there may be organisational objects you don’t need in your target state – and therefore have a large opportunity to rationalise your data footprint, by only using the data related to your target organisational structure.
The biggest tip at this phase – is to treat data as a technical project work stream with its own plan, owners, and KPIs.
