Automated Transformation: Shift Gears

When your ERP software supplier provides an upgrade or enhancement, or the business demands new functionality only available in a new release, how do you organize the migration of your many customizations?

Most companies start a manual migration process with a time consuming, and labour intensive proof-of-concept while facing an unpredictable migration outcome. Uncertainty remains and the upgrade enhances the risk for the business as it potentially effects the daily operations.

Wouldn’t it be nice to test drive an automated migration and get an exact project plan and budget calculation? With today’s technology that’s possible, eliminating risks and presenting a 100% predictable outcome to the business.

Remove uncertainty through automated migrations

Uncertainty in projects, especially for the migration of customized code, is highly undesirable. Both in time and budget. You want the freeze period to be as short as possible and no budget overrun caused by advancing insight. Even more importantly, you want to have all the insight before the start of the project.

Over the last few years upfront, automated analysis has become available and is offered by a variety of vendors, but what you really want is to automate the migration itself.

Automated migration is more than just automated analysis

An exact prediction of the outcome with automated analysis is only valuable if you can follow-up on the promise; to be able to deliver the full migration through automated transformation in a fixed price, fixed time manner. Only then will you dramatically reduce the risk, cost and cycle times for complex IT transformations.

Experiencing the added value of new enterprise software versions …right now!

The added value of using the newest versions of enterprise software is clear, the road to achieving this might be unsure and unpredictable. But, the possibility is there with automated transformation of custom code with drastically reduced costs and business risks, exceptionally high quality and very short freeze periods.

Companies should focus on the quickest possible way to benefit from new features and functions offered by their enterprise software supplier. Automated transformation is the way forward to quickly materialize the business value of the latest releases of enterprise software.

Factory Model & Time to Market

Most companies face the continuous challenge of modernizing their portfolio of applications. IT managers are constantly innovating to find better, faster and cheaper ways to maintain and manage IT assets. Especially platform migrations and upgrades can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be difficult, not when you have a well defined repeatable process, a way to automate the most complex parts of the migration, and a partner that can take you through the whole process from start to finish.

In this context an ‘Automated Migration Factory’ program is a perfect way to maximize economies of scale while migrating the application portfolio to the next level platform. The Factory industrializes the process of migrating and testing applications, and delivers a level of quality unrivaled in the industry. The Factory takes advantage of pre-configured tooling and automation, standard specifications and a repeatable approach to ensure consistent quality across the platform.

When starting the process of selecting a partner to help manage and run a large scale migration the following questions should be at the top of the list: Does the partner have a  proven automation platform that meets the requirements? Can the automation rates compete with the industry standards? Does the partner have a focus on forward-looking requirements and R&D investments that supports staying up-to-date with the latest available versions of the software being migrated? Are the services and technology delivered backed by well defined, enforceable Service Level Agreements? Selecting a reliable and experienced partner is critical to making a large-scale migration factory a success.

To start, your partner should spend the time analyzing your IT landscape and systems and use this analysis to deliver a detailed and deliverables based factory program plan. The program plan should group and order system transformations based on system complexity, criticality, and of course, business driven deadlines.

Second, the partner should work with your own team to establish and agree to the repeatable migration process that defines the standard migration steps for each system in scope. Both sides need to be clear on roles and responsibilities and operate as one team.

Third, an efficient mechanism to manage the inevitable change needs to be established. Large migrations projects WILL encounter change, and there needs to be an easy and efficient way to change the scope or order of the migrations when necessary. Predefining the approach to this with your partner is critical.

Fourth, you need to make sure that there is a clear definition of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs need to translate to measurable metrics that cover the speed, quality and issue resolution aspects of the work. In addition, there needs to be agreement on the consequences of missing an SLA. SLA’s without incentives or penalties will not drive behavior or results.

Finally, once a plan is in place, the processes are well defined, a change management process is agreed too, and the SLAs are clear, the factory can start operating and the first system can be placed on the “migration conveyer belt”.  As always, it is advisable to find some quicker wins and complete some smaller, less complex migrations first. The resulting positive momentum and team morale will help prepare you for the more complicated work to come.

An Automation Migration Factory gives your company the flexibility and predictability to build and secure roadmaps. Optimizing your IT position as a Business Partner rather than a Maintenance or Support Partner is worthwhile. Focusing your lights on innovation with a Factory approach gets you IT landscape up-to-date and increases speed, accuracy and predictability to your business teams in parallel.

smartShift is in business to realize these promised Factory benefits. We offer services that help you quickly scope the time and effort needed to properly migrate desired technology. Then, using our unique and patented automation platform and dedicated migration specialists, smartShift helps you successfully migrate your IT landscape and systems. Using automation and a proven Factory approach, smartShift technology reduces traditional risks and costs associated with migration and technology upgrade projects to deliver a faster time to market. While an automation engine executes the work, you reap the benefits of consistent compliance.

Leverage the Power of IT Modernization

Research shows that roughly 80 percent of IT resources go to the maintenance of IT operations and systems. Modernizing IT in any sector is widely perceived as not easy and expensive, but the risks of holding onto legacy systems are many. While companies are striving to satisfy evolving customer demands, new technologies and processes are adopted to increase the speed of doing business. In most cases, customized systems and applications will be implemented into existing IT environments.

Customized applications are perceived as a means to accelerate business response, innovate business approaches and simplify business operations. A McKinsey study in 2013 showed that 40% of IT executives worry that their organizations will not keep pace with technology change and consequently would lose their competitive edge. In addition, they perceive these applications also increase complexity, and processes raise the cost of maintenance and complicate the management and integration of the IT landscape.They experience the following: (1) custom applications are mission-critical and can’t be disrupted, (2) every application is unique and there are no tools to support transformation out of the box, (3) just like the applications every transformation project will be custom and (4) to make a transformation, you need people and tools with understanding of both your applications and the new road ahead.

When modernization is prevented and transformation to the latest technologies is being perceived as too expensive or too big of a risk, companies will lose their flexibility.

smartShift developed a technology platform to overcome these challenges and uses patented processes for automated transformation.The platform enables customers to convert custom applications to meet business requirements in an automated and risk-free way. Automated transformation benefits include automated, algorithm-based configured tools aligned to your individual landscape, industry standards and corporate standards. It handles 20+ computer languages. The result: reduced process bottlenecks, quick and riskless upgrades to state-of-the-art technology and less dependency on IT partners.

The advantages of automated modernization and transformation are multiple:

  • Dramatically reduce the time and resources historically required through a manual approach for enterprise IT transformations
  • Reap the benefits of sophisticated solution design and rule sets
  • Ensure extensive compliance and security standards with comprehensive format handling and data translation
  • Accommodate all data types, and increasing data transaction volumes with any-to-any transformation
  • Rapidly onboard new connections to facilitate the exchange of all data between systems, applications, and external partners

IT modernization is the continuous evolution of an organization’s existing applications and infrastructure software, with the goal of aligning IT with shifting business strategies. IT modernization implies the acquisition and deployment of modern technologies—along with their associated skill sets and capabilities—to replace legacy environments, without having to start from scratch. Simplifying the IT landscape of your company reduces TCO while improving the agility of your mission critical custom application.

smartShift provides a comprehensive automated transformation solution that accelerates application integration, allowing companies to integrate any system or application faster than traditional methods. Modernization of your IT Landscape allows you to become the Agile Enterprise your customers and business partners asking you to be.

Automation Path to S4 & Beyond

Along with our friends in the SAP industry, we have spent too much of our time in the past year in the debate around the merits of a ‘Greenfield’ approach versus a ‘Brownfield’ approach for customers moving to SAP’s newest ERP platform. ‘Greenfield’ is based on the premise that it is better for customers to start with a blank slate and re-implement, while …

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