As an SAP solution, we do more than preach digital transformation; we also practice it. What choice do we have? The digital economy’s imperative to use data to deliver better customer experiences applies to us as much as it does to our customers.

For several years, SAP has been pursuing its digital transformation – moving to the cloud, changing business models, and adopting intelligent technologies to get the most out of our data. A critical part of this journey has been moving our cloud offerings off legacy databases and onto the SAP HANA platform. This project is complete for most cloud line-of-business (LoB) solution portfolios. This paper explores the transformation stories of the organizational units that support these solutions. These units faced two common challenges, including the teams supporting SAP S/4HANA® and SAP Customer Experience solutions.

The first challenge focused on adapting each solution to take full advantage of the architecture of SAP HANA. Applications and solutions were re-engineered to exploit its ability to bring together transactions and analytics on a single data instance, thus enabling real-time business insight.

The second challenge related to the downtime window for migrating customer data. To minimize this downtime, SAP developed migration technology to automate data conversion and accelerate the migration process.