Preparation is key: ensuring an efficient and secure go-live for SAP S/4HANA migration

What all transformation and migration projects have in common is that they are often complex, time-consuming and costly. Optimizing the cutover is therefore crucial to the success of the project.

The supreme discipline of cutover

The cutover involves the holistic transition process from the old to the new system or from the old to the new process environment. After months of preparation, in some cases, the go-live of the new system environment is imminent. To ensure that everything runs smoothly, countless tasks, stakeholders and dependencies must be orchestrated within a tight timeframe. If this does not succeed, it harbors risks - not only for the success of the go-live, but also for the entire project. The core elements of the cutover are small-scale and differentiated tasks. These usually have to be carried out by a larger group of people (cutover team) and are interdependent.

The challenges of a cutover

As the critical point of any migration project, the cutover presents many challenges. Ensuring a smooth process can be difficult due to the complexity of the various individual activities and their interdependencies, the high personnel and time requirements for the implementation of the cutover, and the communication between the many players involved. Natuvion's experienced cutover managers draw on a broad range of technical and methodological expertise from a large number of successfully completed cutover projects. In conjunction with the cloud-based application Natuvion CORA, this ensures that nothing goes wrong during the complex and tightly timed processes of a cutover.

The perfect duo: cutover management and Natuvion CORA

The core elements of cutover management are the creation of an optimally coordinated cutover plan, including fallback scenarios, as well as task management, status updates to stakeholders, and cross-departmental communication during the cutover. In this way, the Natuvion cutover manager supports the entire process in collaboration with the customer. The cloud-based cutover application Natuvion CORA perfectly complements cutover management and specializes in the detailed planning and management of cutover scenarios. As the single point of truth during the cutover, the Natuvion CORA software-as-a-service solution enables efficient task management and provides real-time monitoring anywhere and at any time. Both the necessary dependencies and parallelization of tasks are taken into account, keeping both the overall runtime of the cutover and the technical downtime as low as possible.

The path to a successful cutover

Has everything been covered? Have all stakeholders been informed of their responsibilities? Many tasks need to be identified for the cutover. Dependencies need to be taken into account and to the tasks must be carried out by interdisciplinary teams. Many areas, such as SAP Basis, release managers and those responsible for business processes, are involved in the cutover of SAP S/4HANA projects. The complexity of the cutover increases steadily with the number of factors to be taken into account and these are recorded in the detailed cutover plan. As part of the dress rehearsal, the entire cutover plan is tested with all stakeholders involved. This ensures a smooth process and good preparation for the upcoming go-live.

The perfect plan

Based on its extensive experience with SAP S/4HANA projects, Natuvion has developed a tried-and-tested plan structure in which the necessary activities are categorized according to their dependency on the migration. In collaboration with the large number of parties involved in an SAP S/4HANA project, the necessary activities are identified and detailed in an iterative development process, while the specific persons responsible are named and dependencies and possible parallelization of tasks are defined. During the preparations for the cutover, both the cutover plan and the corresponding fallback scenarios are continuously developed. The fallback plan is the safety net for a cutover cancelation. This backup strategy describes how to roll back all tasks previously carried out as part of the cutover up to the restoration of the old system landscape.

Communication is everything

Due to the complexity and scope of a cutover in an SAP S/4HANA project, an in-depth communication strategy is essential. Natuvion's approach has already enabled this elementary coordination to be carried out successfully and efficiently in numerous SAP S/4HANA projects. The strategy's content can be specified via coordination between the key people involved in each phase and subsequent reviews. To ensure cross-phase orchestration, the cutover plan is coordinated in its entirety with all parties involved.

Iterative process within the cutover roadmap

The implementation of the cutover

The go-live of a new system environment, and therefore the implementation of a cutover, usually only takes place over a long weekend to minimize interruptions to business operations. Here, the cutover team's control center is responsible for monitoring everything and communicating unplanned changes. The Natuvion CORA cutover application simplifies this by sending automated emails, such as for status updates, and visualizations using BPMN and GANTT charts. This ensures that all those responsible in the interdisciplinary teams are immediately informed about task availability, completion or delays and can react immediately. This saves a lot of manual effort and time and reduces the project risk, as potential complications are detected immediately. Natuvion offers the optimal combination of factors for a successful SAP S/4HANA migration with experienced cutover managers and the professional cutover tool Natuvion CORA.