Upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0Īll companies on a release lower than SAP ERP 6.0 must upgrade. “Because SAP HANA retains all the data in the main memory all the time, memory that’s filled with debris becomes a cost driver,” Hois explains. But with SAP HANA, it’s a different story. This doesn’t matter in the “old world.” The data is stored on disk and the extra cost is minimal. And even when everything works out fine, the data stays in the system. Yet, they rarely do, because they want to ensure that they can fall back on the old version if anything goes wrong during the migration. Every time companies migrate to a new version, they should part with old data. He believes that up to 20% of data volume could in fact be data garbage. IT landscapes undergo changes, but companies still hang on to, for example, interface protocols for systems that are no longer there. “There’s a whole lot of junk in systems that is irrelevant to day-to-day business,” he says. Hois also recommends tackling the task of data purging. Transferring such custom code to SAP S/4HANA is effort that companies could spare themselves. Adjustments that are necessary for SAP HANA apply equally to unused and used code, and they have to be tested, too. “Taking dead code with you involves work,” says Hois, who advises eliminating code that is no longer needed.

This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s a good idea to take a look at the code in your system and rid it of excessive bloat. Clean up your custom code and data management (recommended) “It is possible to go from here to EHP 7, which is the latest enhancement package at the moment, without converting to Unicode,” explains Rudolf Hois, vice president and head of SAP S/4HANA development, “but because most customers combine this step with their database migration to SAP HANA, it makes sense to convert first, as a preliminary measure.” 2. There are companies out there that, for example, still work with SAP R/3 Release 4.6.

But if you want to run SAP HANA, you’ll need to convert to Unicode, regardless of your current ERP release or which enhancement package you are on. However, not all companies have been interested in converting to Unicode, particularly those that do not do business globally. As a result, code pages can be displayed in multiple languages. SAP Business Suite has already been enabled for Unicode – the international standard for encoding, representing, and handling text – for some eight years. Andreas Schmitz has documented this short process considering individual steps. Regardless of whether you deploy SAP ERP 6.0 with or without enhancement packs (EHPs) or are on an even older release, the journey to SAP S/4HANA is always similar.

Sap ecc ehp7 upgrade guide