Case Study: Converting SAP to S/4HANA.
How we supported an international pharmaceutical company through a global SAP-to-S/4HANA conversion - fully validated, with minimal disruption to operations and an on-time go-live, even under pandemic conditions.
Replace the platform without stopping operations.
With the customer's existing SAP releases due to reach end of maintenance over the coming years, and S/4HANA offering a faster, more efficient platform, the customer needed to convert its worldwide SAP estate to S/4HANA. The core challenges were:
- Maintaining production at every site worldwide - with minimal disruption
- Testing efficiently - without testing every function multiple times in each country
- Absorbing S/4HANA changes in parallel with the ongoing changes coming out of operations
- Ensuring the technical conversion across all clusters
A template approach that consolidates testing.
To manage the project's global footprint, the work was organized into clusters; QFINITY was responsible for the template and for all validation activities in the EMEA cluster. The project ran in two stages: a technical conversion phase - adapting existing developments and assessing the impact on documentation and test cases - followed by a series of test cycles. The template approach meant most functional testing was carried out centrally, with local testing reserved only for localizations and site-specific risks. The main challenge was the formal, integration-level testing at the local sites, which at peak required coordinating more than 10 FTE of validation resources in parallel.
On-time go-live - with no local outages.
The converted S/4HANA system went live successfully, with no local failures and no issues bringing operations back up after the conversion days. Every test was reviewed and released within the planned timeline - all under pandemic conditions, which put a heavy strain on the project and on communication, since no on-site support was possible. The go-live date held all the same.
Test centrally, save locally.
The template approach concentrates functional testing in one place - so validation scales across time zones and sites without re-testing every function over and over.
More from our project work.
Get your S/4HANA conversion validated and across the finish line.
We bring the template approach from this project to yours: bundled testing, gap-free traceability, an on-time go-live. In a free initial call (about 30 minutes), we'll outline the validation strategy for your conversion.
Book an intro call
