Author: Thierry Julien, CEO of TJC Group
As SAP customers, you already know you’re facing a move to SAP S/4HANA project. You may already know if you are planning a Greenfield Brownfield or any_kind_of_colour_the marketers_will_come up_with_ project.
But there is still something some customers do not get: what’s going to happen to your current ERP system? Some of my experienced contacts still believe it’s a ‘usual’ SAP upgrade, and the ECC system will be deleted as older versions of SAP have been. On the contrary, this could be one of the more costly mistakes.
During the move to S/4HANA :
- Some tables will not exist any longer
- Some master data will no longer exist
- Some of the data is transformed
- Some of the data is not selected in the project
- Code (programs) are no longer the same and SAP does not provide change history
It used to be a challenging question for kids: when you change the knife handle and then the knife blade, do you still have the same knife? Now, it’s a question for your tax expert. The move to S/4HANA does not provide tax traceability from the origin of the system.
SAP customers are usually the biggest and wealthiest companies of the planet; and this could be a tax heaven for auditors soon. Deleting your ECC system, or getting rid of it will bring corporations at risk of exposure to potential million dollars fines – this is the price one pays when the data is not available for tax auditors – with the much dreaded ‘reverse burden of proof’ where the taxpayer needs to compute numbers he does not have any longer … to challenge the tax penalty figures.
Needless to say, you’d better consider legacy systems access, or legacy system decommissioning, in your move to S/4 and in your budget planning.
At TJC, we believe you may get rid of your legacy systems, while still accessing them in a cloud-based solution that is fully compatible with the latest SAP technologies.
Let’s talk about it! Get in touch with us.
