Readiness assessments are essential for retail organizations to ensure positive transformations to SAP S/4HANA. If your organization is upgrading from an existing ERP (Brownfield) or implementing a new ERP (Greenfield), readiness assessments could just be what you are looking for a successful implementation.

Retailers are constantly facing an increased pressure to reduce their inventory, provide a seamless omnichannel experience, and provide the customer with real-time insights. Without a strong retail readiness assessment to understand where the organization is today, SAP S/4HANA projects may result in delays, budget overruns, and so many other issues.

Three major reasons retailers need readiness assessments include:

• Complex legacy systems that inhibit performance of the new solution:
• High customization accepting poor integration visibility where a full analysis of business requirements is challenging or impossible;
• There is not enough internal alignment from a whole-of-business perspective.
• Data architecture is incompatible with SAP S/4HANA functionality;

YRC offers businesses specific SAP S/4HANA readiness consulting tailored to the retail space by evaluating technical, functional, and strategic gaps before the migration or implementation of the new system.

What is SAP S/4HANA Retail Readiness Assessment?

A SAP S/4HANA Retail readiness assessment analyzes your organization’s existing systems, processes, and infrastructure in order to determine the readiness for S/4HANA implementation. Conducting a SAP S/4HANA readiness assessment is important in order to prevent making costly mistakes and to have a clear roadmap for migration or adoption.

The core components typically assessed are as follows:

• Existing SAP and non-SAP system
• Complexity of custom code and integrations
• Master data quality and readiness
• Business processes in alignment with SAP S/4HANA best practices
• Infrastructure and cloud readiness

Whether you’re implementing S/4HANA for the first time or migrating from ECC to S/4HANA, the assessment will allow key stakeholders to understand the full scope of the project in terms of feasibility, effort, and value.

YRC is experienced in helping retailers with a full SAP S/4HANA pre-implementation assessment, effectively aligning the business goals of the organization with the ERP capabilities.

Greenfield vs Brownfield: Which Path Should Retailers Choose?

The decision of going Greenfield or Brownfield is one of the most important decisions in your SAP S/4HANA retail transformation journey. They both have unique benefits and are relevant for different retail environments, based on the maturity of existing systems, complexity of processes, and strategic objectives. A Greenfield design means starting from the ground up, new system design, whereas a Brownfield migration means upgrading the existing SAP environment.

Understanding the implications of these various approaches for each retailer enables alignment of IT strategy with business growth and agility. We will now discuss how the results of your readiness assessment can inform this decision for success over the long-term.

Greenfield Approach:

• Reconceptualization of all processes
• Utilization of S/4HANA best practices
• Best suited for systems that are legacy-heavy and outdated

Brownfield Approach:

• Retention of configurations
• Shorter, less disruptive project
• Best suited for organizations with optimal SAP landscapes.

Some of the most important considerations are:

• Process standardization level needed
• Amount of custom code and data
• Compliance and future-proof

YRC looks at both Greenfield and Brownfield alternatives as part of its S/4HANA readiness check for retail and provides clear direction for an organization’s pathways.

Key Components of S/4HANA Retail Readiness Consulting

Good S/4HANA Retail readiness consulting is inclusive of technical, functional and strategic assessments. It can tell you what’s working, what needs to be worked on, and how to successfully scale up your transformation.

Consulting is typically inclusive of:

• Business process mappings and gap analysis
• Inventory of customizations or extensions
• Data readiness audit
• Stakeholder alignment workshops

Retailers will receive an actionable plan that outlines critical gaps, opportunities for enhancements, and timelines for implementation. This allows retailers to plan and occur a few surprises throughout your S/4HANA journey, while sharpening your decision-making abilities.

YRC are retail transformation specialists that can expertly guide retailers through all aspects listed above, bringing clarity, cost efficiency and expertise to any decision you can make before choosing to fully implement or migrate.

How SAP S/4HANA Pre-Implementation Assessment Reduces Risk

Jumping into SAP S/4HANA without a pre-implementation assessment has the potential for operational interruption, cost overruns, and deadline delays. These assessments act as buffers as they address and identify challenges and risks before any resources are consumed.

Here are the benefits of a pre-implementation assessment:

• Identifies integration and interface challenges
• Identifies inconsistencies and quality issues with data
• Identifies potential licensing gaps and compliance issues
• Prepares the organization for change management
• Retailers will have visibility into their technical and organizational readiness. This sets expectations for a successful SAP journey.

YRC’s defined process for pre-implementation assessment for SAP S/4HANA helps retail organizations manage risk more significantly, and increase their ROI from the ERP system.

SAP Retail Transformation Readiness – What You Need to Prepare

When getting ready for an SAP Retail transformation readiness, it requires more than a vendor-installed tech upgrade; it entails creating alignment of people, processes and platforms. Retailers will need to consider their digital maturity, change management capabilities, and ability to collaborate across functions.

Some key indicators of readiness may include:

• An agile supply chain, and inventory management
• Shared customer and product master data
• Digital integrated payment and POS capabilities
• Capabilities to manage real-time analytics and transactions

Retailers that do not follow these readiness checks are often witnessing poor go-live outcomes, or are not using all of S/4HANA’s capabilities and benefits.

YRC is ensuring that retail businesses are truly transformation-ready by establishing their functional goals, and their corresponding SAP Retail capabilities – thereby creating conditions for sustainable, and scalable, digital growth.

Conducting a Comprehensive S/4HANA Readiness Check for Retail

YRC can provide detailed diagnostics and recommendations regarding where your systems are today and what you need to do to reach a go-live state using an S/4HANA readiness check for retail.

Key areas reviewed include:

• Business function usage
• Simplification items
• Add-ons
• Custom code
• Fiori readiness

The readiness check also helps estimate implementation timelines, resources needed, and total cost of ownership. The document provides a shared view of implementation readiness for both IT and business teams.

YRC combines SAP tools with proprietary models that provide proven and actionable readiness checks for retail clients that are migrating to or implementing S/4HANA.

Understanding the Retail-Specific Challenges in S/4HANA Migrations

Retailers work in fast-paced omni-channel circumstances that require the management of inventory, pricing and customer experience simultaneously. Making a decision to migrate to SAP S/4HANA without assessing the unique circumstances in retail can disrupt and, we suggest, increase risk. Throughout this initiative we will identify challenges specific to retail that other businesses may not experience. It is relevant to acknowledge that retail organizations experience high volume, real-time transactions, unique seasonality, and POS integration, all of which can impact and necessitate specific system configuration.

A successful SAP S/4HANA migration assessment retail initiative will identify these types of bottlenecks specific to the retailer. An example to illustrate this point is that the legacy systems that a retailer utilizes may not be capable of providing real-time analytics, which makes it increasingly difficult to offer promotions; customize promotions to specific customers; or track inventory on a real-time basis. Utilizing our detailed readiness check will ensure that organizational readiness is thoroughly evaluated so retailers understand if they can leverage existing systems to utilize SAP Retail modules.

YRC can apply its depth of knowledge in retail domain expertise to resolve these matters. We help clients align their business processes with SAP capabilities to create operational workflows that enable technology enhancements to be directly linked with customer service, shelf availability and store margins.

Benefits of Conducting an Early S/4HANA Retail Readiness Check

The many advantages of carrying out a S/4HANA readiness check for retail at the outset of your transformation cannot be overstated. The readiness check is an early evaluation of what works, doesn’t work, and what needs to change in order to become operationally efficient. It allows you to flag risks early, for example, add-ons that are not compatible, incomplete or obsolete data structures, and so on. This will save you time and money.

The readiness check also facilitates decision making for Greenfield versus Brownfield approaches. Retailers have clarity as to how to deploy SAP Fiori apps, embedded analytics, and machine learning tools. Most importantly, it fosters communications and buy-in amongst all departments of the organization such as IT, finance, operations, and merchandising.

In short, by uncovering any custom code dependencies or integration dependencies in the beginning, you’ll have time to refactor or replace them. In this regard, YRC allows customers to have structured, tool-based assessments with retail-ready reports and ensure that your SAP S/4HANA journey starts off on a solid foundation with less risk for surprises or unknowns late in the project.

YRC’s Role in SAP S/4HANA Migration Assessment for Retail

YRC is instrumental in carrying out not just an end-to-end SAP S/4HANA migration assessment, but also supports the client’s technical and strategy readiness for migration in the retail sector. YRC has years of experience in the retail domain and provides organisations with specific pathways, guided technical analysis, and full-scale change management plans.

What you can expect from YRC in your readiness assessment:

• Certified SAP assessment frameworks
• Assessment and sourcing of retail-specific process
• Fit-gap analysis for Greenfield/Brownfield workflows
• Recommendations on migration path and effort plans
• Up-to-date visibility with dashboards and reporting

By reducing migration costs as well as any down-time for their clients and their customers, YRC adds value to a retail business transitioning to SAP S/4HANA.

FAQs

Our Services

• Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
• SOP IT integration
• Franchise Consulting
• Project Report Development
• Process Audit
• Mystery Shopping
• Training