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Your organisation may be looking to migrate to SAP S/4HANA but doesn’t want or need to take all of its historical SAP data over to the new system. You’ve probably already heard of the main approaches to an SAP S/4HANA migration, but you may not know about the third option:
- A new implementation or greenfield approach
- A system conversion or brownfield approach
- Shell conversion
A new implementation may be the right approach if you need to re-design most or all of your processes, while a system conversion is appropriate where you are keeping your current processes and wish to migrate your existing SAP data to SAP S/4HANA. A shell conversion is an approach for customers moving from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA who don’t want to migrate all of their historical SAP data, particularly if there is a lot.
Move to SAP S/4HANA with Selective Data Transition | SAP Blogs
It can be extremely costly, technically challenging and complex to transfer many terabytes of data. A shell conversion works by copying your production system and custom code and converting this ‘empty shell’ without your transactional or master data over to SAP S/4HANA. The result is a very intelligent but empty system which is fast, efficient and cost-effective to set up.
Of course, your historical data is not lost, it is required for many reasons not least for legal and regulatory ones. It is maintained in your ECC system or transferred to a data warehouse which can be accessed when required. Once your new system is set up, data migration follows with master data, open items and balances.
You might ask what happens when I need to do business trend analysis across a period of time using old and new data? This is still perfectly possible and simple to do by consolidating data from the new system and old system into your data warehouse.
Automating your shell conversion
Like a system conversion, you can dramatically speed up and de-risk your shell conversion with our automation technique. Our MIGNOW software tool uses AI to automatically convert SAP ECC systems to SAP S/4HANA, and is available to use for on-premise, hosted or private cloud environments including SAP RISE with SAP.
RISE with SAP is a cost-effective option when considering a shell conversion because you are only paying for the data you need, rather than paying for unwanted historical data.