The Ultimate SAP Cloud Upgrade Playbook

PETE HOGAN, Senior Vice President of Information Technology, Compana Pet Brands

For those of you who have been through a few large ERP integrations and/or upgrades, you know the effort it takes to get them right and avoid business interruption. Since 2012, I’ve either led directly or indirectly 14 ERP integrations, migrations or upgrades across multiple ERP platforms, so I also have an appreciation for when something reduces complexity. We recently completed an SAP cloud upgrade on RISE for S4/HANA from version 2020 to 2023, and this is the story along with a blueprint to share, as it was the best project in this area I’ve experienced in 13 years.

Once the deals were signed with SAP and an integration partner, it took SAP 1 month to deliver us a sandbox environment where we could upgrade our version at no risk (I heavily recommend this approach). From the time we received the sandbox environment to Go Live, it was just 3.5 months! This time was mostly spent in code remediation for anything found through the upgrade tools, along with testing and a little more testing.

The result was a very non-eventful Go Live with a few observations, one slowness issue and one self-inflicted problem. However, nothing impacted taking orders, building product, shipping or invoicing, so even with a few minor issues this was a very good success story.

“The timeline, ease of upgrade, and cost all dropped radically from prior large ERP upgrade experiences—this was truly the first time I had experienced the reality of an easier upgrade path”

What I wanted to share was more of a blueprint for the “why” this went well as it was better quality, faster than anything prior, and a low cost to execute (yes, all three better, faster and cheaper).

The Blueprint:

• First and foremost, we had a great internal lead managing the choir.

• We also had an amazing partner in Hitachi. They knew the process well, had done other upgrades and proactively worked issues/concerns with SAP. Critical to have a partner with this level of experience.

• Repetition, we ran the upgrade 3 times in pre-production environments before production, so we had great practice in finding items, correcting, and validating.

• We leveraged good upgrade tools that found the code issues before we even began. We also had 100% code remediation before going live.

• We leveraged the wisdom from older SAP test cases and increased test case coverage by 25%.

• Completed 100% of test case execution and 100% of testing case finding remediation before Go Live.

• Support, we had an extensive list of contacts for critical support during Sunday if needed for all key 3rd Parties.

• Also, we had partner agreements in place proactively where needed to get support for the SAP to Partner integrations.

• Executive Sponsorship as we included executive sponsors with SAP and each key partner to ensure escalation where needed.

• Communication, we communicated regularly over multiple weeks to CPB, 3PLs, and Partners to ensure all were informed of the event to avoid surprises.

• Post Upgrade Validation, we set up detailed smoke testing Sunday (including in-plant printing and scanning) to ensure all worked as expected before releasing the system (so we had a fallback option until after solid validation was complete).

• The foundation, SAP got their upgrade process in the cloud right! Sort of the core for everything and it worked as advertised.

You might say this was just a cloud-to-cloud upgrade, so it should be easier, and you’d be right. However, I have been hearing the promise of an easier upgrade path for ERP platforms for almost 8 years now, and this was truly the first time I had experienced the reality of one. Don’t get me wrong, had we not done code remediation and very detailed testing, this would not have gone well (based on what we found in both areas). However, the timeline, ease of upgrade and cost all dropped radically from prior large ERP upgrade experiences, so I thought this story was not only worth sharing but the blueprint for it as well so others can reap similar benefits.