The Importance of Assessment in Systems Migration

.Institutional
The Importance of Assessment in Business Systems Migration
April 24, 2024
5 minutes reading

Guilherme Joventino, COO and co-founder of Mignow, highlights the importance of Assessment for companies that want to migrate to SAP.

Enterprise systems migration is a crucial journey many organizations face in their quest for improvement and efficiency. This transition, often centered on changing the SAP system, requires thorough planning to ensure a smooth and successful process. This is where the Assessment stage, also known as Discovery, comes in, playing a fundamental role in carrying out this migration.

What is Assessment?

Assessment, also known as Discovery, is a standard process of mapping the organization's environment, designed to provide insights into the foundation of an organization's system and its needs. This step occurs before migration and is essential to understand the database, as well as the conditions and configurations existing in the company's system. This prior analysis of the environment plays a fundamental role. The key to this process is information, which will be analyzed and used by a professional to conduct the migration and take the organization to its new environment, which will be optimized with new, unprecedented features.

Imagine migration as a path to be followed, where the organization wants to move from one version of SAP ECC to S/4HANA. However, to make this journey successfully, it is essential to have a map that indicates the path to follow. The Assessment provides the study necessary to create the map, including information about the current environment, the challenges that will arise in the process, details about the data to be transported and, equally important, the time and cost involved in the migration.

SAP itself makes this service available to its customers through the Readiness Check, where a series of information related to the system is presented, such as size, base and version. However, it is possible to go further with this functionality, measuring in more depth in order to provide more detail for the company, which leads to more security in estimating costs and downtime, for example, to have a more complete and more detailed survey. customized as the basis for migration.

In this Readiness Check complement, the information provided by the procedure is analyzed and, together with the company, studied to define what will be taken to the new environment and what is no longer relevant to the new environment after migration. This is where important decisions are made, including the migration model, which can be Greenfield (implementation from scratch, that is, completely restructuring your environment without taking anything from the previous environment); Brownfield (previous configurations and history are loaded into the new environment, i.e. customizations, transactional data are maintained); Bluefield (all configurations, all developed programs are taken, but not the transactional data, it's as if it started SAP from scratch).

The Value of Assessment for Migration

Assessment plays a fundamental role in ensuring a smooth and successful migration. Here are some of the main benefits:

1. Making Informed Decisions: This step helps the company understand which SAP modules must be migrated, which is essential to determine the level of complexity of the migration and identify the necessary journey to the new environment. Additionally, it provides valuable recommendations such as the most suitable migration model and recommended SAP version.

2. Clarity and Self-Knowledge: offers a detailed view of the size of the database, personalized codes (known as “Z's”) and other elements of the system, providing clarity and self-knowledge to the company. This helps to identify opportunities to optimize processes and functionalities that can be useful according to the organization's needs, minimizing risks and unexpected changes during migration.

3. Improved Performance: By providing detailed information about the system and its integrations, Assessment contributes to improving the performance of both users and SAP software. This can lead to the optimization of work processes and the identification of beneficial opportunities for the organization.

Although the Assessment is valuable, it can present operational challenges, such as executing the Readiness Check, a step from SAP itself. The complexity of this process comes from the handling of extremely sensitive information, but this concern is resolved through the confidentiality agreement (NDA).

In short, the Assessment stage is crucial, both for the company carrying out the migration and for the organization that is migrating. It provides the data necessary for a complete understanding of the environment, guiding the company towards the next steps and ensuring a successful migration. Assessment is an essential ally in the search for efficiency and improvement of business systems, contributing to success in an increasingly digital business scenario.