Migrating from older generation ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA offers great potential to improve operational performance and transform business processes. However, this major program doesn’t happen in isolation. A smooth transition requires careful attention to SAP S/4HANA integration, especially SAP EDI Integration with external trading partner systems.
5 questions to answer before migrating to SAP S/4HANA
As companies plan for their S/4HANA migration, addressing key SAP HANA integration challenges early on will help mitigate risks, prevent delays, and ensure long-term success. Read on to learn five key questions every enterprise should answer before embarking on their SAP S/4HANA journey.
1. How are we minimizing risk and disruption?
The average cost for a company to migrate to SAP S/4HANA varies widely depending on organizational size, complexity, and specific requirements. Generally, SAP S/4HANA migration costs range from $250,000 for smaller implementations to hundreds of millions of dollars for large enterprises.
The high costs raise the stakes around managing risks related to the budget, but this is only a part of the story. Since ERP systems play a central role in supporting day-to-day business operations, ensuring minimal disruption during the transition is a key priority for organizations.
In fact, despite the looming 2027 support deadline for SAP ECC, nearly half of SAP ECC customers are still considering staying with legacy ERP beyond that date, citing concerns about complexity, cost, and risk. SAP itself emphasizes that a carefully planned migration approach is essential to ensure business continuity and minimize operational risk.
Integrations with other systems play a central role in managing the migration risks. Unfortunately, in the broad realm that is SAP S/4HANA integration, there is one area that tends to get overlooked. Too many organizations treat SAP EDI integration as an afterthought and set themselves up for encountering delays, unplanned costs, and other issues during implementation.
2. Do we know all our integration requirements?
SAP S/4HANA integration projects demand precise understanding of how data flows between systems. With internal systems this is usually a lesser issue since they are managed by the organization itself. However, external partner systems tend to cause a lot more headaches since partners can have very diverse requirements.
Making matters worse, existing SAP EDI integrations that hold the key to figuring out these requirements have usually been built over years—or even decades—project by project and without comprehensive documentation.
Because of this, mapping out the specific requirements can be challenging, and many companies resort to a “brute force” approach with their systems integrator manually reviewing individual EDI documents. Alternatively, vendors specializing in EDI can help capture the partner data requirements faster and more efficiently.
Without clear visibility into current-state integrations and the specific trading partner data requirements, organizations risk missing key details that will create complications in the later stages of the migration. A comprehensive review early on ensures accurate data modeling and avoids costly rework.
3. How much can we trust the data coming from external partners?
A survey by IDG found that 44% of the data feeding corporate ERP systems comes from external sources. Business operations, therefore, are highly reliant on the quality of the data exchanged with trading partners. According to another IDG survey, only about two thirds of respondents considered external partner data to be accurate.
With such a high expectation of errors within partner data, it’s important to address this at a very early stage. What’s best is to incorporate SAP HANA data integration and B2B data quality management considerations into your business process design when defining your SAP S/4 migration project.
4. Do we have the tools and skills we need for SAP EDI integration?
Thanks to the diversity of trading partner data requirements, managing SAP EDI integration can be notoriously complex. The challenges compound when the business has an extensive network of trading partners to manage or the partners span multiple geographies.
Problems are often related to using legacy integration tools. In the case of B2B data exchange, generic integration platforms are not designed for managing the complexities and diversity of connecting with external systems and managing partner engagement. However, even with modern, fit-for-purpose tooling, lack of specialist EDI expertise can lead to poor design choices and slow integration support and change management.
To tackle these issues, organizations need a modern integration solution that supports both traditional B2B/EDI integration and API integration use cases and ideally streamlines SAP HANA cloud integration with system-specific tooling. Beyond technology, having skilled integration specialists involved is equally important to execute a successful migration strategy.
5. Are we truly ready for SAP S/4HANA integration?
Today, most organizations begin their SAP S/4HANA integration journey without clearly defined B2B or SAP HANA data integration requirements. Identifying the requirements in the beginning of the S/4HANA migration project minimizes the risk of encountering surprises and delays during implementation and can even accelerate system blueprinting by speeding up data model definition.
Modern integration technology, in turn, allows for optimal solution design by leveraging the most suitable integration patterns for each use case from real-time API integrations to efficient message-based transaction flows.
Having both a clear understanding of the current integration needs and the solution design options enabled by modern integration technology is an essential component of readiness to embark on the journey to S/4HANA.
Get Started: Ensure a Seamless Transition to SAP S/4HANA
Migrating to SAP S/4HANA is a complex undertaking, but with the right integration strategy, it’s also a powerful opportunity to modernize and future-proof your operations. Asking the right questions before you begin will allow you to identify integration challenges early. This means you’ll reduce risk, streamline trading partner connectivity, and accelerate time to value.
OpenText provides the modern integration tools, expertise, and data readiness insights needed to make SAP EDI integration seamless and scalable.
Explore how OpenText can simplify your S/4HANA migration here.
