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3 Ways to Reduce the Cost and Complexity of Moving to SAP HANA

23-04-2021 5 min read

When planning a move to SAP S/4HANA® a sound information management strategy is key to your success.

A well-crafted strategy will help you:

  • reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO)  for the new in-memory system
  • decrease system downtime during the transition
  • minimize risk by enforcing compliance with internal and external retention requirements

Data management or housekeeping will be an important step as you move to SAP HANA, particularly if you are converting an existing system. Even companies choosing to do a greenfield implementation can benefit from having a data management strategy in place to manage the data left behind in legacy systems after the move.

Here are three (3) ways that data management can help you prepare for SAP S/4HANA:

1. Use archiving to shrink the size of the existing SAP database. This reduces the size and the cost of the HANA system you will need to purchase.  As discussed at SAP TechEd in “The SAP S/4HANA Journey from October On” (https://discuss.asug.com/docs/DOC-45872) —  “The number one way to control the cost of SAP HANA  is to really be smart about your data archiving strategy.”

2. Reduce the total number of data and documents moving to the new HANA system. The move to SAP S/4HANA will be quicker and easier if you have fewer documents and less data to move. Move "business complete" information in a lower cost archive repository instead. Dr Pepper Snapple Group was able to reduce the total time required to complete the migration of a 20+ TB system to SAP HANA by almost one day using this strategy.

3. Purge data that is no longer needed to reduce risk. According to a survey by SAP, approximately 50% of data in SAP systems is 2 years old or older (see “TechEd 2016 Las Vegas: ITM211 Data Volume Management in the Context of SAP S/4HANA Conversions”). Use the move to SAP S/4HANA as an opportunity to clean up the data in your SAP systems. Keep only the data that is required to support legal and fiscal regulations and purge the rest if it has reached the end of life.

Want to learn more? Read the Dr Pepper Snapple Group success story. 

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