Case Study: Converting SAP to S/4HANA.
How we supported an international pharmaceutical company through a global SAP-to-S/4HANA conversion. The system was validated, disruption to operations stayed minimal and the go-live was on time, 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 followed by a series of test cycles. The conversion phase covered adapting existing developments and assessing the impact on documentation and test cases. 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 executed, reviewed and released within the planned timeline, even under pandemic conditions. Those conditions 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. Validation then 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.
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