S/4HANA Migration Assessment for a Leading North American Apparel Brand

Company Profile

The customer is a well-established North American apparel retailer with 1200+ Stores across the USA, known for offering a wide range of fashion products, including clothing, accessories, and footwear. With a strong retail and online presence across North America, the company serves a diverse customer base, consistently adapting to trends and consumer preferences. Their focus is on delivering high-quality apparel while enhancing operational efficiency and expanding their digital capabilities.

Objective

The client needed help building their roadmap and plans to migrate to SAP S/4HANA. To justify the project, they needed a value case for how they would leverage multiple business improvements, including an initiative to implement a new Merchandise Planning & Allocation solution. This solution would provide an opportunity to streamline integrations and optimize their end-to-end Merch and Logistics business processes. Additionally, they needed a plan to update their SAP analytics and POSDM solutions.

Key Challenges

• Significant changes required to the Merchandise Ordering Process.
• Handling transaction codes deprecated with a move to S/4HANA.
• Resolving data sources for Analytics impacted by the migration.
• Transitioning to Business Partner in S/4HANA.
• Understanding code currently used in production.
• Suboptimized application landscape with decades of technical debt.
• Managing diverse processes across multiple brands and addressing manual tasks in Asset Accounting.

To address these challenges, the client conducted a comprehensive S/4HANA assessment leveraging the Applexus CeleRITE toolset, an AI powered platform for comprehensive S/4HANA migrations. The assessment explored the various migration options available and identified the right approach that would save them significant time and cost.

What we did

• Completed a comprehensive technical migration assessment leveraging the CeleRITE Assessment toolset.
• Leveraged CeleRITE’s Code Carve-Out Studio and SAP Custom Code Migration App to identify key objects that will require code optimization and rework along with a forecast on how much can be automated by the CeleRITE tools.
• Used CeleRITE to identify processes that can be optimized during the migration and reduce manual efforts.
• Conducted key business stakeholder workshops to better understand current process weaknesses and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Provided strategic guidance on integration with the new Merch Planning & Allocation system to ensure seamless processes.

Key benefits

• CeleRITE determined 70% of the code can be migrated with our Automation tools , significantly reducing the manual coding effort.
• With the recommended Brownfield approach leveraging CeleRITE tools, the development effort including time for object migration and code optimization can be reduced significantly.
• Assessed over 1700 RICEF objects. After eliminating unused and duplicates, 194 RICEFs were identified for remediation and simplification, reducing considerably the migration effort
• Applexus recommended adopting SAP Standard functionalities to eliminate 240 custom objects, ensuring future compatibility and reducing custom development needs.
• Applexus recommended several improvements to their application landscape as well as many opportunities to reduce their technical debt as they moved to S/4HANA.
• Applexus recommendations will lead to improved Merchandising and Financial processes and unlock additional business performance opportunities provided by S/4HANA.