The phased approach to S/4HANA migration at Zeiss

The SAP transformation Zeiss CIO Carsten Trapp wants is not really a big deal for the corporate IT department. “It’s pretty unspectacular for us,” he says. “Like all other companies, we’re doing it right now because SAP will end support for R/3 and become S/4, so at some point you’ll be there.”

After all, Zeiss’ IT has been working on this since 2017, and in 2020, it became clear to the board because this shift would be a big and long-term project with great consequences for the group.

Focus on standards

As things progressed, Trapp deliberately opted for a greenfield approach. “It’s a lifetime opportunity to clean up, because we, too, have messed up our R/3 system over the last 30 years,” he says. By starting over on S/4, his team can set up all processes cleanly in the SAP standard from the start. Plus, he’s declared it a mandatory requirement to stay with this standard wherever possible.

Since the SAP migration doesn’t involve IT transformation as much as a business transformation, Zeiss is working in tandem with other management, so the project is jointly led by IT and the greater business.

Zeiss also chose Microsoft Azure for the platform on which SAP S/4HANA will be operated.

After Trapp’s team secured backing from the board, he had to deal with a lot of change management. “When it became clear we were using the standard — we were no different from anyone else — a big wave of organizational change started,” Trapp says. It was necessary to explain to colleagues from specialist departments that the processes and systems would change. “But actually everything will stay the same, except you might now click on the top right rather than the bottom left,” he adds.

The team worked on a persona level and developed the change in a way that was appropriate for the target group. “We answered questions concerning what it means for the company, specific areas, and for each individual process,” Trapp says.

A template for efficiency

When it came to harmonization, Trapp took a similar approach. “We have four divisions, and I don’t know whether a purchase-to-pay process needs to be different four times,” he says. So his team set about standardizing such processes. IT had proven that this often works and the concept was pushed ahead across the group.

“We’ve come a long way with standardization and harmonization,” he says. “We’ve built a template in the standard and only deviated from it for things that were absolutely necessary.” And each of these deviations was checked by a design authority and approved individually.

So far, Zeiss has rolled out three pilots, with the last go-live scheduled for October 2024. “We chose these four pilots to see the company’s specifics once.” The pilots are structured based on an organization:

• that did not previously have SAP.
• that manages the sales and services business across all segments and sells products from all divisions.
• that’s strongly focused on production.
• with a strong shared service history.

Trapp’s team collected evidence step by step that the new standardized SAP template works in different areas of the company. On this basis, Zeiss can begin rolling out the SAP template to more than 150 entities worldwide by 2030 from October.

SAP licensing in phases

The first six early adopters among the entities to receive the template after the pilot phase are already being looked after by the project team in a so-called initiation phase. “Through an assessment from both the business and technical side, the roll-in readiness of the respective entity is assessed before the actual roll-in begins,” he says. “For example, the surrounding systems are identified so we know which data from which systems we need to migrate.”

In the roll-in phase, IT should make the system world S/4-ready with the respective candidate, while the existing R/3 system still runs in parallel. This means getting the system and data ready for the new solution, and training the users. This is followed by the technical go-live after tests, and finally the business go-live, after which the old system will no longer be accessible. According to Trapp, the handover to the operations team marks the end of the roll-in after the successful completion of the hypercare phase.

Employees are trained internally using self-created training materials, and have access to classroom, individual, and process SAP training on site and via video. “These training courses are also managed by our IT department because we’ve established as a qualification concept within the group that only trained people with an SAP license are allowed to operate the system,” says Trapp.