The Business Value of SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management

The value of data has been widely discussed over the past decade or more, but it’s only now that organisations have the means to access that value. Recently the complexities around mining data for business insights have been overwhelming for many.

Organisations face challenges in data integration and data management and the diverse, distributed and dynamic application data environments of the digital economy. So, in 2022 and into 2023, what is the business value of an SAP advanced data migration and the subsequent continued management with Syniti? Recent research by premier global intelligence firm, IDC, and commissioned by SAP and Syniti, explores this topic.

The companies that were part of this research identified usage patterns of the Syniti solution for their SAP S/4HANA and SAP Application Migrations, as well as the rationale behind their choice of Syniti. All of these organisations were transitioning to a SAP application, but most of them were migrating to S/4HANA.

Interviewed customers cited multiple factors for their choice of the solution, such as the ability to handle and transform unstructured data, the ability to effectively handle large-scale migrations and the solution’s consolidation capabilities for dealing with merger and acquisition requirements. Another recurring theme was that the Syniti and SAP approach was in line with the data-forward agendas of these organisations, which boosted comfortability.

Understanding Business Data Migrations

Let’s start at the beginning. Business application migrations are not trivial projects; they often require extensive planning, significant investment in people and technology and multiple iterations of testing, which typically uncover problems that could lead to application and/or process failures. Drivers of application migration range from application version upgrades; the retiring of legacy or bespoke applications; the consolidation of multiple application instances, hybrid cloud migration, business process reengineering, or mergers and acquisitions. The persistence of the global pandemic, challenging geopolitical circumstances, rising inflation and ensuing increases in interest rates are additional challenges that organisations are constantly dealing with. In order to reduce downtime and improve business resiliency and outcomes, migrations have evolved into long-running processes that must respond quickly to changes in operational environments and macro impacts.

Many business application migration projects will include a business transformation component, but the effort associated with it will vary depending on what is driving the need for migration. The common denominator across all migration projects is data, and that is where a significant amount of project time (and money) is allocated.

Data intelligence includes business, technical, relational and operational metadata that provides transparency of data profiles, classification, quality, location, context and lineage. This trustworthy, reliable data enables people, processes and technology. As with the varying degree of business transformation being dependent on drivers of the migration, so too will be the amount of intelligence required about the data being migrated.

If not an explicit mandate of a migration project, data integration and quality clean-up are always part of the project, regardless of the scope. Knowing where data originated from, what it signifies, how much of it is replicated and how much of it is actually unique — as well as how clean or dirty the data is — will help you integrate and get your data ready for migration.

Business value and quantifiable benefits

The research conducted by IDC on August 2022 indicated that although there is short-term pain in undertaking any data migration and management project within an organisation, the business value and quantifiable benefits of such a change is huge. Research respondents described the most significant benefits from an SAP and Syniti-powered migration as:

• Access to cleaner data while reducing manual approaches — Organisations have a much more sophisticated toolset and management process for keeping their data clean. Significant manual work is also cut out and it provides organisations with advanced alerts and warnings when something is going wrong, before a downstream problem is created.
• Enabling data evolution — It allows data to evolve and grow with the organisation through flexibility and agility (as opposed to static data that does not continue to add value).
• Improved data migration and governance — Governance is all about keeping a high standard once a company has gone through the process. Maintaining high quality is critical for success.
• Improved business agility — Organisations can move forward with enhanced business agility optimised for cost and have a centralised database with real-time accessibility that provides enhanced alignments. Organisation can be more streamlined with automated processes and reporting analytics.
• Risk reduction — A reduction in risk helps the business downstream. It reduces both the risk when organisations have ‘go-lives’ and the issues that may arise.
• The capacity to take on more projects — Some of the organisations that took part in the research said that the largest benefit for them was the capacity to accelerate all parallel data migration executions to support their business transformation projects.
• IT staff productivity gains — IT teams such as systems integration teams and migration-related IT teams were able to increase their levels of efficiency. IDC puts the value of these IT staff time savings and efficiencies at an annual average of $2.04 million per organisation ($13,500 per $100 million in supported revenue).
• Business productivity benefits — Employees who rely on high-performing applications to perform their jobs, including application developers and end users, benefited from process efficiencies by getting applications more quickly and at higher levels of data quality. As a result of these benefits, IDC attributes an annual average value worth of $1.93 million per organisation ($12,800 per $100 million in supported revenue).
• IT infrastructure cost reductions — Advanced data migration and management provided a more cost-effective approach by reducing manual effort and avoiding project cost overruns. IDC estimates this will result in average savings of $183,000 per organisation per year ($1,200 per $100 million in supported revenue).

Numbers speak for themselves

The benefits of an SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management by Syniti (SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management) have proven results as indicated by the benefits highlighted in Figure 1.

^{Figure 1: The Business Value of SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management by Syniti for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Application Migration.}

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The only constant is change.” This theory rings true in recent history, and the research illustrates that data migration is not a ‘one and done’ project but an ongoing program that continues to meet the challenges of change head-on, leveraging fit-for-purpose solutions. Business agility — the ability to respond dynamically to change — has
been a goal of many organisations. In 2022 and 2023 that goal is no longer a strategy but a tactical necessity, as the world has changed dramatically in a very short time period and disruption continues.

Data migration projects can be difficult and onerous, but research respondents were able to use the SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management by Syniti to reduce the number of data sources they needed to migrate, which in turn led to on average a 46% faster data migration project. The benefits of having higher-quality data in critical SAP applications have widespread effects, such as
reducing their operating expenses and more productive analytics teams and other employees. These wide-ranging benefits are the reasons these organisations are expected to realise an average of $4 of benefits for every $1 invested in the SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management by Syniti solution.

Image credit: iStock.com/400tmax