Support for SAP ERP ends in 2027. SAP customers will have to make their way to SAP S/4HANA. In this article, we show how low-code can help with the migration
In seven years’ time, support for SAP ERP 6.0 will be discontinued. SAP has announced that mainstream maintenance will be free of charge until the end of 2027 and that extended maintenance will be available from 2028 to 2030 for an extra fee.
Nevertheless, SAP customers should consider as soon as possible how they can best migrate to S/4HANA. This includes thinking about existing processes and considering which of them should even be considered in their current form during the migration.
There is still a certain amount of hesitation in German-speaking countries. According to the 2019 Lünendonk study, 52% of companies are still in the process of preparing their business case and 30% are still drawing up their transition roadmap.
Source: Lünendonk study 2019
Standard vs. freestyle
For those who have created applications with SAP in the past that do not deviate from the standard, i.e. have not been customized, this is not too problematic. There are simple migration options for this.
However, data migration from old ERP systems (e.g. R3) with client-server software to S/4HANA currently poses a problem for those SAP customers whose apps deviate from the standard content because they have created individual freestyle applications and are therefore not compatible with S/4HANA. This applies to UI5 apps.
So now that SAP is moving its entire technology stack to browser and web technologies, what do these customers do with the numerous changes, customizations, etc. they have made within their client-server software over the last few decades?
As Fiori is at the heart of the SAP user interface strategy, sooner or later all SAP user interfaces will be based on Fiori.
This is already standard for S/4HANA systems.
Fiori apps
The affected SAP customers must therefore port these old, individually created applications in the form of Fiori apps. Companies that are already planning to revise their applications, make them mobile-capable and/or use new features offered by S/4HANA that were not available with R/3 can of course do this with all old applications.
Fiori apps are a modern SAP dialog that runs via the browser, is mobile-capable and has been greatly enhanced in terms of design. However, in the course of their S/4HANA migration, in many cases they now have to carry out this porting hundreds or thousands of times, which of course means a massive amount of additional work – especially if, as is the case with Fiori, everything has to be programmed manually. This is made even more difficult by the severe lack of resources in terms of experts for the implementation of UI5 apps at many companies that work with SAP systems.
Low-code technology helps
In principle, the Fiori Launchpad is of course a very good option when it comes to creating Freestyle UI5 apps or replacing existing apps. However, UI5 programming skills are required for this.
However, if the aim of the S/4HANA application migration is not only to benefit from the advantages of Fiori during creation, but also to save time and involve all departments with their expertise in the implementation, an alternative solution should be used: The Simplifier low-code platform. Why? The SAPUI5 framework is used for the development of Fiori interfaces. Simplifier is the only low-code platform that works with the OpenUI5 framework and generates HTML5 applications based on UI5.
Simplifier can also be used to generate apps that are independent of end devices and operating systems.
Due to the fact that Simplifier automatically generates quality-checked source code, a considerable amount of programming work is no longer required. Creating apps with Simplifier is very easy to learn. This in turn enables employees from the specialist departments to participate in the creation of applications even without programming knowledge. Simplifier also simplifies the integration of existing necessary SAP systems thanks to ready-made standard interfaces to SAP systems such as REST, SOAP, SQL, OPC-UA or SAP RFC.
Conclusion
If you are faced with the question of how best to migrate to S/4HANA, you should consider using low-code technology to easily create UI5 apps.
Simplifier offers the possibility of quickly and easily replacing existing R/3-based “Freestyle UI5 applications” and preparing these applications for use on a variety of the latest end devices.
The fact that Simplifier is easy to learn means that even employees from specialist departments who have no special programming knowledge can still take part in creating applications and support IT and application developers with various processes within application lifecycle management (ALM for short). This saves a great deal of time and counteracts the lack of resources.
Thanks to its agile methodical approach, Simplifier also helps with the prompt migration of existing R/3 content to the S/4 world and also supports the simple integration of all necessary SAP systems.
