Your organization is planning on moving to S/4HANA in the near future. And that’s a good thing. Your IT team have been planning for months/years, they are primed and ready to make it happen. But deep down, some doubts are beginning to surface no matter how hard you try to quell them. Will this new implementation be as rough as the last go-live? Will you have better data this time, will users be adequately educated on how to use the system effectively, will there be sufficient support for the change the organization will go through (again), and will the design match business needs this time around?
If thoughts like these are keeping you up at night, you are not alone. Many COOs are hesitant to move forward because of their fear of the implementation trap. Last time, the IT team viewed the implementation as a huge success, but the business team? Not so much. Ask and they will tick off the problems: users only know a limited scope of functionality within the system: no real data ownership was established and there were issues with ongoing data housekeeping activities. Lack of transactional excellence such as, timely data capture, limited audit trails and transparency . A large amount of manual activity was expended with third party tools and the proliferation of spreadsheets usage. The result of all this was mistrust of the data, frustration with the system, degrading of service levels, increased demand for IT support, and rising operating costs.
