As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.
This time it is Robert Cummings, Founder and CEO at LeapGreat which focuses on automating migrations from SAP ECC to S/4HANA.
At Deal Architect, we tend to focus on new markets – GenAI, changing verticals, emerging countries etc. This year we have added another area of focus – Application Modernization and Migration. After 25 years of cloud and AI applications, more than 70% of ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications are still stuck in their client/sever or even earlier architectures. One of the major reasons for staying put – the high cost and disruption of migrations, because they are so labor-intensive. So we are looking backwards on legacy applications but pushing a new angle – lets aim for lots more automation, less hand-to-hand combat, in moving them to newer versions.
For nearly two decades now, SAP has run campaigns that it helps the “world run better”. The ads would highlight factoids like “SAP helps produce more than 70% of the world’s chocolate” and similar in other industries. Impressive but increasingly you realize many of these companies run on ECC applications, especially in Tier 2 and 3 of their supply chains, and many were implemented in the 1990s. The expression goes “it is ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The corollary to that is “old is not always gold. Often it has turned to junk” It is difficult to recruit resources to work on ancient applications, they are increasingly security and compliance risks and they do not easily support more recent AI, IoT and other innovations.
So, I am really pleased to have Bob Cummings, a long time veteran of SAP projects at PwC and various executive roles at SAP kick off the series. He also has a patent to his name for work around SAP enhancement packages. With SAP’s announced 2027 deadline for ending ECC support, he points out we “are faced with a tsunami of tens of thousands of S/4HANA transformations in the next few years, where everyone is struggling to scale and find resources, and wondering how we will ever manage all that.”
Here's his Aha
“In our experience (project failures have little) to do with the quality of the software, or the implementer, or the project team or the methodology. Nowadays, the quality of all those are usually very high…But I would say the root cause of the problem can be summarized in the word “late”. Most of the detailed visibility and heavy lifting, and the escalations and problems happened very late in the implementation. …what we found that is in the first phases of the project, the work is very conceptual, where the customer needs to imagine an end state,,,you don't know what you don't know... when you start, you might see some demos, you'll see some proofs of concepts, you'll see lots of explanations and presentations. But it's always about imagining your own real target system, which will actually only begin to appear later during a realization phase, and often a bit late in the realization phase, as well. Only then does the take the project takes on a new dynamic, which is very noticeable. You begin to work in the reality of the real working target system. And the surprises start to appear where you start hearing comments like, Oh, that is not how I thought it worked, or why can't the system do this? Or that? Or did we specify what we wanted this or that to do this, there's no such thing as a perfect specification or a perfect blueprint. The devils are often in the detail. And, and we see them quite late. So this is where we start to see late change requests, scope begins to creep, we have re-planning efforts, we need new budgets…”
The LeapGreat approach is to use its automation and factory concepts to front-load the migration - move ECC data over to S/4HANA in a week (yes) and allow you to play with, train on, re-imagine previous customizations as parameter configurations in S/4’s expanded (and for some features transformed or redacted) functionality – and get to a “clean core” while leaving behind tens of thousands of lines of custom code.
Of course, ERP implementations are never that simple. More coming in this series which will focus on conversion of legacy custom code, data conversion, integration with surround applications, testing, training, change management and other phases of any implementation or migration project. The key in each area is there are automation tools and factory scaling concepts starting to become available.
As I tell him towards the end, automation has allowed many an industry to create “super workers” with unbelievable productivity many of which I profiled in my book “Silicon Collar”. It will be good to see enterprise apps also see that level of productivity. And what we develop for migrations will also help in applying continuous improvements vendors are regularly delivering,
Very nice job in about 25 minutes from a brilliant, very well-traveled and really nice guy.