Author: Content Marketing team, TJC Group |Co-author: TJC Americas team, TJC Group
In a recent TJC Americas webinar on digital transformation and the journey to S/4HANA migration, industry executives shared valuable insights about the challenges and opportunities facing organisations today. This blog captures the key discussions on the importance of SAP ERP decommissioning, data management, and more between Andreas Gresser, CEO and founder of ERP Strategies, and Jochen Hager, Co-CEO at TJC Americas. Read on!
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Executive challenges in SAP transformation
- The value proposition of digital transformation
- Legacy data management and AI integration
- Financial implications of system decommissioning
- TJC Group’s Enterprise Legacy System Application (ELSA)
- Project timing and implementation strategies
- Regulatory compliance considerations
- Critical points for organisations to focus on
- The final word
Introduction
As organisations worldwide accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, the migration from legacy SAP ECC systems to S/4HANA has become a strategic imperative. However, this transformation comes with its own set of unique challenges, particularly around data management and legacy system decommissioning.
Keeping these challenges as the core, we explore the critical considerations that keep CIOs and CEOs awake at night, the evolving role of legacy data in an AI-driven world, and practical strategies for achieving successful digital transformation outcomes. As a matter of fact, industry experts shed light on how to overcome S/4HANA migration challenges and more. Below is an excerpt from our discussion!
Executive challenges in SAP transformation
Q: What keeps CEOs and CIOs up at night when looking at the SAP ECC to S/4HANA journey?
Expert answer (Andreas Gresser): The biggest concern is complexity. A single ECC system can have 500-600 interfaces with numerous satellite systems around it. The old interfaces have been running forever, but nobody really knows exactly what happens when you switch to something else.
The second major challenge is delivering innovation to the business. CIOs need to be partners in business solutions, not just maintainers of the status quo. With so many software vendors presenting their solutions as the best, the question becomes: does the business actually get value out of it?
Q: Of the potential improvements, like process enhancement, cleaner data, or system landscape simplification – which do CIOs and CEOs value most?
Expert answer (Andreas Gresser): Business value is number one. If the business doesn’t acquire something faster with more visibility, better data, greater reliability, or stronger commitment – the point of spending money becomes null. This holds true not just for software, which might be the smaller part, but on implementation, which can be very tricky.
The second priority is data. Data is typically underestimated and lacks proper accountability in companies. It just runs somehow, in many silos. You might have someone managing vendor data and someone else managing customer business partners, but nobody owns basic data across all silos and business units in an enterprise.
The value proposition of digital transformation
Q: Why do companies often leave valuable legacy data behind during their S/4HANA migration?
Expert answer (Jochen Hager): You can achieve true transformation when doing a complete transition from old to new. Only half the job is done when transitioning a part of the data before or during S/4HANA migration. It’s equally important to manage the data that stays behind in your ECC system. This data is highly valuable and contains all business information from the past that should be available for analytics, data mining, and future strategic decision-making.
Expert answer (Andreas Gresser): Adding to the point above, Andreas Gresser explains how why data is the new oil. In the past, reusing data from legacy systems was always tricky. You needed semantics, the meaning of data, data relations, and so on, to move pieces and data entities together. This was a large undertaking without great immediate business value, so it was often neglected because it was too expensive for too little perceived value.
Today, with the integration of AI everywhere, we can train models so that AI tools use data from other sources and systems, compiling it for better usage by end users and data analysts. As a matter of fact, even SAP comes with integrated AI, making SAP ERP decommissioning a much easier and streamlined process.
Legacy data management and AI integration
Q: What should SAP customers do in an ideal world to prepare their data for AI purposes?
Expert answer (Andreas Gresser): I would hire an AI officer or data officer first; basically, someone accountable for finding the right tools, implementing modelling, and ensuring it stays inside the company. They need to buy and train their own models, then make them available to all employees.
I know a company that did exactly this. They’re using Copilot in an enterprise, private version, and employees can now ask the tool to summarise PDFs or perform other tasks. They’re much faster now, where efficiency improvements are evident.
Q: How do you see the role of legacy data evolving in the context of AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics?
Expert answer (Andreas Gresser): The beauty of combining legacy data with actual transactional data is that AI models can find relationships and patterns we couldn’t see before. The question is: how far back does legacy data go, and is it relevant to S/4HANA migration?
For example, a company I worked with still uses R/2 (a super old SAP system) because their business processes and operations haven’t changed. For such areas, we can say that old data makes sense, but does it really?
If you consider the retail sector, they moved from store to online. Does it make sense to use old in-store data for online business scenarios? Maybe not. I’m not sure what an AI tool could conclude from old data applied to new capabilities or scenarios.
Financial implications of system decommissioning
Q: What are the financial implications of not decommissioning legacy systems after digital transformation?
Expert answer (Andreas Gresser): Well, this is a wide chapter. What I’ve seen across many customers is they went through ECC to S/4HANA transformation, made the business case assuming they would retire old systems, but at the end, they didn’t retire them because they didn’t know what to do with the data.
They still had regulatory requirements and scenarios where people needed to look back into old systems. So, they kept systems running, leading to several unrealised expenses. Without SAP ERP decommissioning, there will be additional tasks to update the old systems’ software, operate them somehow, ensure security updates are in place, making it a line item on the CIO’s budget.
From an operational perspective, they still have to run these systems, even if they’re not productive and only handle priority-one issues. This is where solutions like TJC Group’s legacy system decommissioning become valuable, where organisations can under SAP ERP decommissioning and still manage data outside the old ECC system while remaining accessible from the new S/4HANA.
TJC Group’s Enterprise Legacy System Application (ELSA)
Q: How does TJC Group’s ELSA solution address these challenges?
Expert answer (Jochen Hager): ELSA (Enterprise Legacy System Application) is an SAP-certified application built on the SAP Business Technology Platform. It allows access to historic data, documents, static reports, and archive data either through the ELSA portal or custom Fiori tiles integrated into your Fiori screens.
ELSA helps decommission all your systems, SAP or non-SAP. Moreover, it provides an audit trail for compliance proof, from data extraction through storage to database loading. We follow compliance guidelines like GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act, and others, with extensive authorisation management and data masking features.
So, if you are planning for a S/4HANA migration, decommissioning the old system with ELSA is a major win-win. The process has major phases: extraction (database tables, documents, attachments, static reports), storage (on your choice of platform), and import into your chosen database (MS SQL, Postgres, or HANA for high performance). Once data resides in the database, it’s ready for user access and fits into SAP’s Business AI concept through Parquet extracts.
Project timing and implementation strategies
Q: When should organisations start their decommissioning project?
Expert answer (Jochen Hager): It depends on where you are in your journey. If you’re already on S/4HANA and have data remaining on the old system, we analyse what’s left, what’s still needed, and build the decommissioning process accordingly.
If you haven’t started your S/4HANA journey, then we suggest running the SAP ERP decommissioning project parallel to your S/4HANA implementation. As you define new retrieval screens, you simultaneously design legacy data retrieval screens. The same experts are involved at the same time, creating huge cost savings.
In fact, you avoid being hit with a large budget item at the end of your S/4HANA transformation when your coffers are empty and your team is exhausted from a multi-year project. Running projects in parallel means minimal additional effort and minimal impact on time and manpower.
Regulatory compliance considerations
Q: What impact do data privacy regulations have on decommissioning?
Expert answer (Andreas Gresser): The rules are clear and must be obeyed. I wouldn’t see big concerns with old ECC systems, but sometimes legacy systems are so old they can’t even delete records when customers request it. I know cases where companies got fined because their systems couldn’t manage data deletion requests.
For old ECC systems, you need updated software to manage data as required by regulations. It’s not a massive concern, but it’s a real operational requirement.
Q: How can legacy data from ERP be used for AI when on S/4HANA?
Expert answer (Jochen Hager): There are multiple access methods. Parquet export interfaces ensure data is cleanly exported with all privacy regulations and authorisations intact for AI environments. For data to be used after S/4HANA migration, the environment allows direct SQL database access, though this circumvents authorisations and makes data more widely accessible. We’re currently exploring several avenues with customers to determine the best AI integration path for each situation, balancing accessibility with security and compliance requirements.
Critical points for organisations to focus on
Based on this executive discussion, several critical points emerge for organisations planning their digital transformation by SAP ERP decommissioning:
Complexity management is paramount: The interconnected nature of SAP systems requires careful planning and expert guidance to avoid disruption during ERP migration.
Business value must drive decisions: Every transformation initiative should deliver tangible benefits to the business, not just technical improvements.
Legacy data represents untapped value: Historical data contains valuable insights for AI and analytics but requires proper management strategies to realise this potential.
Parallel project execution optimises resources: Running legacy system decommissioning alongside S/4HANA migration minimises costs and maximises efficiency.
Compliance cannot be an afterthought: Data privacy regulations and audit requirements play a crucial role, and your decommissioning strategies should include them from the beginning.
The final word
The journey to S/4HANA represents more than a technical upgrade as it presents an opportunity to fundamentally transform how organisations manage and leverage data assets. With proper planning and the right solutions, companies can achieve their transformation goals while preserving access to valuable historical information and positioning themselves for future AI-driven innovations.
For organisations embarking on this journey, understanding the importance of SAP data archiving when migrating to S/4HANA or decommissioning legacy systems becomes crucial for long-term success. TJC Group’s expertise in data volume management and legacy system decommissioning can help ensure your transformation delivers maximum value while maintaining compliance and operational efficiency.
Contact us now for more information!
