In case you missed it, you can even read more on Laing O’Rourke’s journey to S/4HANA on diginomica.
At Connect we also shared the results of our S/4HANA adoption survey, which revealed that 26% of organisations are now using S/4HANA compared to 16% last year. Moreover, of those that said they are already using S/4HANA, 9 out of 10 said they were satisfied with the product.
Closing the skills and training gap
Of the 352 organisations surveyed, almost three quarters said they were either using or planning to move to S/4HANA. Given the upcoming ECC 6.0 maintenance deadline, this isn’t hugely surprising.
One of the biggest challenges remains around S/4HANA skills and training. Over a third felt the level of training provided by their partner during implementation was poor, and a similar number felt SAP didn’t provide customers with enough technical resources or training to help them manage S/4HANA. It’s clear that the entire SAP ecosystem will have to work together to make sure organisations have the support and skills they need to make their implementation a success. Training is critical to a smooth transition to S/4HANA; and better, more tailored training will continue to be a key issue for us as your SAP user group.
The customisation conundrum
One of the major challenges highlighted by the research, centred on customisations. 92% of organisations said that existing customisations presented a challenge when moving to S/4HANA. 58% were planning to rebuild their required extensions/customisations on the SAP Business Technology Platform, whilst 28% plan to keep their existing customisations. Just over one in ten plan to remove customisations entirely, replacing them with standard functionality.
Overall, the amount of change management required to move to S/4HANA was higher than expected according to a third of organisations – this is something we are taking a closer look at in our Cost of Change whitepaper, members can access this via resources.
Although our survey shows that there is significant appetite to move to S/4HANA, there are still some hurdles to overcome. With this in mind, if you are planning to make the move to S/4HANA you may want to check out our S/4HANA Special Interest Group. In addition, we have relevant episodes on our SUGTalks podcasts such as ‘Making the Business Case for Moving to S/4HANA’ which you can listen to here or part 1 and part 2 of our discussion with Dawn Ingle on Shoosmiths’ move to S/4HANA.
