Avoid errors and mistakes when moving data to SAP S4/HANA

It shouldn’t be a controversial statement to say that ensuring that your data is clean, enriched, and normalised is a key element for any successful implementation and migration to a new system. However, far too often data is overshadowed by implementation work during a migration.

When it comes to a business-critical systems for ERP and asset and maintenance management, such as SAP, the risk of moving bad data or adding errors is something that should be high on the focus list for any asset management and procurement team.

Whether you’re moving from SAP ECC or R3 to the new S4/Hana, this article will help you ensure you haven’t overlooked key aspects of preparing and moving your data, and if you haven’t started planning, why the correct preparation and approach is essential for your migration journey.

How Sharecat Helps SAP Migrations for Industrial Companies

It’s all well and good writing an article, but, without the knowledge and experience to back it up it is only theory.  Thankfully Sharecat Data Services can proudly claim to have a long track record in supporting industrial organisations with SAP data, including many data migration campaigns.  Right now our team is working with a range of operators as a part of their SAP S4/Hana migration, ensuring data quality in MRO and asset data is provided as a key deliverable in the transition to SAPS/4HANA. The preparation scope can be anything from data cleansing to eliminate errors, data enrichment to add meaningful context, identifying and eliminating duplicates and normalisation to ensure consistency.

Many of our customers are SAP centric organisations and, thanks to our 30 years of operations, we have experience with all active versions of SAP that are in use at any given time. Often a single customer has multiple versions, as well as multiple instances, all of which depend on high quality and complete data to function correctly.  

A SAP Data Migration campaign is a natural part of our services that customers request for our help with. As with all our work, it is tailored specifically for industrial companies and their operations, ensuring data integrity and applying Master Data Management best practices as part of a smooth migration process.

MRO Data Migration for SAP S/4HANA

Maintenance, repair and operation data (MRO) is one part of the total data in SAP. The need to migrate to the new S4/HANA presents a unique opportunity to set a basis for normalised long term data governance in your organisation as a part of the process.

Considering key elements for robust long term use of S/4HANA across your operations requires understanding of the data and the work processes.  Something that a system integrator does not have.  SAP Data Services from a specialist provider, such as Sharecat Data Services, optimises the collection, validation, preparation, improvement and transfer of your MRO data held in material masters and asset masters across your current SAP instances.

Common challenges in SAP Data Migration

Any migration to a new system or version presents major challenges and potential risks. For migrations for SAP, typical challenges include:

Duplicate records: These build over time and result in significant waste for your operations.  It is important to identify and remove these to reduce the volume of data to be migrated and prevent ongoing waste.  

Inconsistent input: migrating multiple facilities or multiple instances often includes variations in definitions, input and work processes which adds inconsistency to the data.

Incorrect Data: Errors in material descriptions, incorrect part numbers, wrong descriptions and incorrect unit prices.

Incomplete Data: missing fields and values such as UNSPSC code (see also our article about how to use UNSPSC codes), min/max stocking levels, etc.

Inconsistent Structure: Old data is often using old definitions and terminology, resulting in problems for governance and compliance.

Lack of expertise: Not a data challenge, but instead a challenge for execution. Successful migrations require a combination business process and data expertise.  No one provider or department covers all of these areas, and so it is important to ensure you have the right support.

We’re now going to state the obvious - rushing into a SAP S/4HANA migration without the necessary planning and preparation and migration support will mean that many companies make their situation worse rather than better.

Improvement Opportunities as part of SAP Data Migration

You may be dreading the mountain ahead of you that a SAP migration presents, but, while data migration in presents challenges, it also offers valuable opportunities that expert help should enable you to exploit:

Data Cleansing: Improve data quality by removing duplicates and errors.

Enhanced and updated DataGovernance: Implementing best practices, international standards and initiatives (such as CFIHOS, or eClass) for data governance ensures compliance and better decision-making.

Data Standardization: Restructuring Materials Data Management for better operational efficiency.

The Role of Data Governance & normalizing data in SAP Migration

Data Governance can often be considered to be the strict grown up trying to herd a group of enthusiastic data sources in the same direction.  When data governance’s voice is not strong then you can almost guarantee some form of rework will be required down the line.

Applying relevant standards and regulations as part data migration gives Data Governance the strong voice it needs.   A data normalisation campaign should always be part of the preparation work for migrating MRO data.  Our participation, working with operators, across a range of industry initiatives enables us to provide valuable guidance to our customers for the changing landscape for best practices and how to apply relevant standards, alone or in combination, in a unified data governance approach.

Standards and best practice is the centre of good data governance, where normalisation and classification are how to embed standards and best practises into data.

Migration Steps for SAP MRO & Material Master Data

Ok, so we have flagged a few areas where things often go wrong, but what are the steps to ensure are in place to succeed in your migration to S4/HANA?

Review, preparation. cleansing, enrichment and normalisation are the steps are vital to have reliable and complete data so that you can fully utilise the features of S/4HANA. The approach for each organisation depends on the specifics of your company, but a general good approach is as follows:

1. Data Assessment: Audit existing data quality and identify gaps.
2. Data Cleansing: Remove duplicates and errors.
3. Data normalisation: align and standardise the data you have
4. Data Enrichment:  Add key fields and relationships where they are missing.
5. Test Migrations: Conduct test runs to verify data accuracy.
6. Final Migration: Execute the migration with minimal operational disruption.
7. Post-Migration Validation: Check to ensure data integrity and fix any inconsistencies.

We hope this article highlights that there are a lot of variables to consider. While this is likely your first migration for many years, there are partners such as Sharecat Data Services who are well practiced in the migration challenge who can help lighten the load.

If you’d like to discuss the unique challenges your organisation faces in your SAP S4/HANA migration, and how we could contribute, then