The Critical Role of Testing in Seamless SAP S/4HANA Migration
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Why Organizations Should Migrate to SAP S/4 HANA by December 2027?
Organizations must migrate to SAP S/4HANA by December 2027. Using technologies beyond their End of Life (EOL) can lead to operational disruptions, increased maintenance costs, costly support services, security vulnerabilities, and compliance failures, ultimately resulting in higher expenses and diminished customer experiences.
This short timeframe requires immediate planning.
| End of Support Deadlines | By the end of 2027, SAP will end support for ERP 6 EHP (6-8), and for ERP 6 EHP (0-5) by 2025. Customers must migrate to SAP HANA databases to remain supported. |
| Impact of Database Vendor EOL Dates | Database vendors like Microsoft and Oracle may have different end-of-life dates for SAP-supported databases. Customers need to track these dates to avoid disruptions in their SAP environments. |
| Migration and Support Continuity | SAP support ends on December 31, 2027. To avoid service interruption, plan your SAP ERP database migration to SAP HANA to ensure continued support until that date. |
According to Gartner, only 33% of SAP users relying on its legacy ECC ERP system have purchased or subscribed to licenses to transition to S/4HANA.
As the migration deadline nears, the analyst research outlines that one-third of ECC users have not acquired S/4HANA, and only one-fifth use the latest SAP ERP version in any component.
Why Testing is Critical
Transitioning to S/4HANA requires transferring vital business data to a new database structure. This migration presents challenges due to SAP data’s crucial role in financials, HR, and supply chain. Risks include data inconsistencies, issues with bespoke functionalities supporting business processes, and the possibility of system downtimes affecting business operations.
DSAG, an association representing SAP users in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, revealed findings from a member survey, indicating a growing focus on Security and AI. The survey highlighted that 88% of respondents rated security as medium or high relevance, underlining its importance.
This underscores the critical role of comprehensive testing in ensuring successful SAP HANA migration. However, devising a seamless testing strategy without any hiccups remains a challenge.
What are the testing challenges of SAP migration?
The following challenges arise during the S/4HANA readiness assessment testing:
| High Cost | Manual testing often exceeds 30% of a typical SAP project budget. |
| Time-Consuming | Manual testing delays S/4HANA implementation due to its lengthy process. |
| Lack of Accuracy | Prone to human error, manual testing can compromise accuracy. |
| Management Challenges | Managing and tracking test progress is difficult with manual methods. |
| Limited Collaboration | Manual testing hampers collaboration among teams and stakeholders. |
| Complexity | Testing the multiple functionalities and modules of S/4HANA is challenging. |
| Test Automation Gaps | Many companies lack the tools and resources for effective test automation. |
| Maintenance Issues | The complexity of S/4HANA makes maintaining test cases difficult. |
| Identifying Test Cases | It’s challenging to determine which test cases to run in S/4HANA. |
| Measuring Impact | Manual testing struggles to measure the impact of system changes. |
Top 3 Testing Recommendations for SAP S/4HANA Migration:
Given the extensive architectural and functional modifications, conducting comprehensive testing on new and existing features is crucial when transitioning to SAP S/4HANA. This is imperative to guarantee seamless continuity of business operations, systems, and processes throughout and post-migration.
Functional testing ensures that all modules, from procurement to financial reconciliation, work correctly in the new environment, verifying transaction execution, business process continuity, and interface integrity. Due to the migration’s complexity, test automation is essential for enhancing efficiency, repeatability, and speed, surpassing the limitations of manual testing. Performance testing is crucial to ensure the system meets performance benchmarks and maintains efficiency and stability even under peak loads with the new functionalities and HANA database. Accurate and functional BI reports are vital for decision-making throughout this process.
Cigniti and Tricentis Strategic Partnership in Accelerating SAP S/4 HANA Migration
Since 2015, Cigniti’s strategic partnership with Tricentis has demonstrated its commitment to enhancing client value through advanced testing services. Highlights include a Tricentis Center of Excellence (CoE) within Cigniti, the largest pool of certified Tricentis experts, over 15 joint-partner deals, and custom certifications and trainings via TCIP. The collaboration also features joint webinars, co-managed innovation in quality engineering and continuous testing, early access to beta versions, and pre-built Oracle/SAP Accelerators on TOSCA.
This strategic partnership helps enterprises reduce S/4HANA migration risks, delays, and disruptions and accelerates their migration.
Successful SAP Migration & Test Automation by Cigniti
| The Client | Key Benefits Delivered |
| A leading healthcare provider required validation for migration from SAP ECC to SAP HANA. | Cigniti performed pre-migration, migration, and post-migration testing with 100% test coverage of business processes with custom components integrated and an 80% reduction in test execution time through a robust Test Automation framework. |
| A leading global specialty chemical company wanted assistance with SAP implementation for the fulfillment of orders and product management. | Cigniti’s SAP test accelerator and hybrid test automation framework helped them reduce test efforts by 60-70%. |
Conclusion
Following best practices for S/4HANA migration and creating a comprehensive roadmap ensures a smoother transition. Appointing an optimal implementation and testing partner further enhances results.
Cigniti’s SAP testing practice offers cost-effective solutions tailored to various SAP project needs, including implementations, upgrades, rollouts, migrations, and enhancements. They provide custom SAP testing solutions and SAP test accelerators featuring a pre-built test suite for standard SAP business processes and out-of-the-box functionalities. Additionally, they offer ready-to-use test automation frameworks and over 1700 pre-built test cases/scripts for SAP ECC, S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, and more. The team comprises highly skilled and certified functional SMEs and manual and automation testing professionals with extensive experience across all SAP products and modules.
Consult our ERP test automation experts team to leverage seamless business process centralization & integration.
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