Migrating ERP system from IBMi to SAP S/4 Hana

[vivkumar28]

We are planning to migrate our ERP system which is running on IBMi to SAP S/4 HANA, could you please advise the best practices.

[TammyPowlas]

What is your current ERP system? Is it SAP ERP or another vendor?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Greetings vivkumar28,

The answer would be an easy-fix if what you had was an IBM Iseries (former AS/400). Well, it is true that you would have to find a way to archive all that historic data, but in short, it would be a fresh start - greenfield as we say.

However, I do believe your question is more likely to come from an environment with an SAP ERP installation running on DB2 with an IBM i 7.4, with the latest PTFs applied hopefully 🙂 enough guessing >>> if you can confirm what you have, I am sure others in the community will benefit from this post, as there is not much about migrating IBM i from SAP ERP to S/4 HANA.

Anyway, first things first - review the master guide >>> Conversion to SAP S/4HANA using SUM: ABAP Systems on IBM i

Now, to cut to the chase, the migration options narrow down to DMO basically and the imperative mindset is to be up to date with all patching, including the PTFs.

Use this as a reference >>> https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/883450

A couple of additional thoughts for planning (to avoid frustration). This is all in the guide, but it is extremely relevant:

- For the conversion to SAP S/4HANA on IBM i, you need to shut down all instances on IBM i after the conversion and reinstall them on a released platform.

- When planning your conversion schedule, note that the downtime phase will increase because production operation can only start after your conversion has finished successfully

- Mind the Unicode factor. Make sure that the SAP NetWeaver source system already supports Unicode because SAP NetWeaver supports as of version 7.5 Unicode only.

Other very relevant preparation aspects (it is all in the manual)

When preparing your conversion to SAP S/4HANA 1809 on IBM i, you should also consider the reinstallation of your instances on a released platform.

The general preparation steps for the reinstallation are described in the documents Installation Guide for SAP S/4HANA 1809 and System Copy Option for Software Provisioning Manager 2.0, for example:

• Deactivating the firewall (Windows only)
• Preparing the file system
• Defining user authorizations
• Setting the timezone

Relevant SAP notes to start with:

2835839 - Plans for Upgrade/Conversion to SAP S/4HANA 1809 and Higher for Systems on the IBM i Platf...

2620910 - SAP S/4HANA 1511, 1610, 1709, 1809 and SAP BW/4HANA 1.0, 2.0: Recommended and released App...

Be sure to know whom to tag as your journey move forward. An informal help chain, if such a term exists. For that, I would tag rene.lang and christian.bartels. Here are their blogs, from where I am sure you will collect valuable information for your journey.

SAP on IBM i: SAP Support Required PTF Lists have been updated

SAP on IBM i: Database Migration Option with target S/4HANA 1909 and beyond

SAP on IBM i: Mandatory Post-DMO Activities for SAP S/4HANA Migrations

Beyond that...it is all about planning, planning, and more planning.

Hopefully, this will shed a light and help to address your topic.

Cheers,

Luis

[vivkumar28 · Accepted solution]

Thanks a lot for your valuable comment lazfreitas.

Let me explain about our migration, currently we are running our ERP system on AS400 and database is DB2.

But going forward we would like to remove the AS400 completely and migrating on SAP, hence I am looking for some advice like how much time do you think it would take for migration and best practices while doing the migration.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

So, currently what you have is a non SAP ERP running on AS400, correct?

[christian_bartels]

Hi Vivek,

Luis already covered a lot regarding the technical process of migrating to SAP S/4HANA. However, before you can start the technical migration, you need to prepare the migration and consider several things in relation to you current ERP system:

• Are you targeting S/4HANA On-Premises or S/4HANA Cloud Edition?
• Are all your current ERP applications, inductries solutions and add-ons available with SAP S/4HANA?
• Are you using a lot of custom code that needs to be adjusted to run with SAP S/4HANA?

The necessary time and efforts depend on the answers of the above questions. We have summarized some of that and pointed to some analysis tools in the SAP on IBM i Newsletters of May 2020 and July 2020.

Kind regards, Christian Bartels.

[vivkumar28]

Thanks for your response, please find my response below.

• Are you targeting S/4HANA On-Premises or S/4HANA Cloud Edition?
• Ans: S/4HANA Cloud Edition
• Are all your current ERP applications, inductries solutions and add-ons available with SAP S/4HANA?
• Ans: Now, I am not sure about this.
• Are you using a lot of custom code that needs to be adjusted to run with SAP S/4HANA?
• Ans: Now I am not sure about this.