Embarking on your SAP RISE journey is a significant investment of both time and resources. While many organizations are eager to make the move, getting started isn’t as simple as securing approval for cloud migration. In reality, the groundwork begins long before that. Extensive research is required to justify the investment, demonstrate ROI, and build a well-structured budget. These foundational steps, though often overlooked, are essential for ensuring a successful SAP RISE transformation.
Let’s talk about budget. Building an accurate, representative and well-developed budget for a journey to SAP RISE, comes with many challenges. First, a significant hurdle is the unknown scope of the transformation.
- What systems do I need to address?
- What should I archive?
- What should I take to the new environment?
- Can I decommission my legacy system?
- Where do I start?
These are all normal questions that you might be having right now.
To address these questions, it is essential to gather as much information as possible about the requirements of your transformation, your current database, and footprint. Early on, it is the time to evaluate your current systems, what you’re migrating and what you might be leaving behind. This way, you can work with more realistic numbers once you begin the budgeting process.
But where can you start? Our data and solution architect experts have shared some of the key considerations as you embark on this journey.
Why Budgeting Before Archiving Is a Risk
Creating a budget based on your existing data footprint can be misleading. Unprepared databases often contain redundant records and outdated information. These issues inflate migration, storage, and processing costs, leading to costly overestimations.
Without optimizing your data first, you may allocate resources for unnecessary datasets that could be archived or deleted – resulting in an inflated budget. This leads to a higher projected cost that could strain your financial resources, and you may end up spending money on requirements you don’t need.
This enlarged cost can become a significant barrier to getting your SAP RISE project approved. When decision-makers see an inflated budget, they may hesitate to move forward due to concerns about ROI and feasibility. A bloated cost estimate can delay approvals and even force compromises on critical project components.
By optimizing your data upfront, you present a more accurate and justifiable budget. This increases the likelihood of securing leadership buy-in and ensuring a more seamless path to approval.
The Clean Data Approach
A clean data approach means reducing clutter and eliminating obsolete, trivial data. The more irrelevant data you carry into your new environment, the higher your costs for migration, storage and processing.
By cleaning your data now, prior to your migration, you’re reducing the volume you need to take to the cloud. Assuring your budget reflects the true needs of your transformation. Think of it as laying the groundwork for a more efficient and cost-effective transformation. But what is the next step?
Gather Requirements Early
The sooner you start gathering requirements, the sooner you can calculate a more realistic ROI. Without defined requirements, it becomes increasingly difficult to allocate resources appropriately and predict future savings or costs.
For example, if you wait too long to clarify the data you need to migrate, you risk overspending or allocating resources inefficiently. Similarly, understanding retention management policies in advance is crucial, failing to define what data must be retained, archived, or deleted can lead to compliance risks and excessive storage costs.
Companies should also consider integration requirements for legacy applications. If critical business systems need to interface with the new cloud environment, planning these connections early can prevent costly delays and compatibility issues. Consider if your new landscape allows for legacy system decommissioning, especially when talking about applications you will no longer need but still need to retain access to its data.
Having clear requirements allows you to forecast potential savings from efficiency gains, automation, and optimized data management once your transformation is complete. Establishing your ROI early on helps gain buy-in from key stakeholders, showing them the tangible benefits of investing in your SAP RISE transformation.
Data Archiving
By reducing your database size and addressing data that is no longer accessed or redundant, will allow you to see long-term savings in your budget. Data volume management strategies like data archiving ensure that only the most relevant and useful data is included in your migration. It reduces storage costs, simplifies your system integration efforts, and leads to a more cost-effective transformation.
“Where do I start then?” You may ask. When looking to manage and reduce your data volume, the first step is to take an in-depth look at your current database. It will allow you to identify opportunities for archiving data that does not need to be stored in your primary database.
Some data archiving tools will help you with your database insights, Data ASSIST, for example, takes data archiving a step further by providing real-time insights into your database. This tool helps you identify archiving opportunities while ensuring compliance with data retention policies.
By analyzing data volumes and system performance metrics, you can make informed decisions about what to retain on your primary database and what to archive, without compromising accessibility or compliance.
Thus, when you reduce the data upfront, your budget becomes a more accurate reflection of the resources required for the transformation, helping you stay within your financial targets.
Plan Backwards
Another crucial factor in building a budget for your journey to RISE is considering your timeline. SAP ECC’s end-of-life is set for 2027, which means you have a limited window for completing your transformation. By planning backwards from this deadline, you can determine when to start key activities, such as data cleansing and migration.
Waiting until the last minute, your transformation could result in a rushed process, ultimately driving up costs and bringing errors. When you start with a clear timeline and a well-defined budget, you can allocate sufficient time for each step, making the transformation process smoother and more manageable.
It’s tempting to rely on your current data as a starting point, but this is not the most effective strategy. By reducing data and gathering clear requirements early on, you ensure that your budget is more aligned with the reality of your transformation. This helps you avoid overspending and ensures that your investment in SAP RISE delivers the greatest possible ROI.
A successful journey to SAP RISE starts with a well-thought-out and data-driven budget. Understanding your current data landscape and reducing unnecessary data early on will allow you to build a budget that’s not only realistic but also optimized for long-term success.
