Customer Question of the Month: Boundary Systems and SAP Migration
Your SAP system isn’t an island — if it were, it would be no use to you. To power your business, it needs to serve as the hub of a complex web of interconnected services and platforms.
There’s information flowing into it — like customer orders and supply tracking data — and information flowing out of it, such as invoices, orders for vendors and reports. It’s connected to SaaS applications, banks, third-party development tools, partner organizations and countless other elements.
The boundary systems that connect you to these services need to be factored in to your SAP migration, and can pose additional considerations for complex migrations. To do its job, your new SAP landscape needs to be properly interfaced with all the other systems it relies on, even when you’re changing multiple components of your landscape at the same time.
What are Boundary Systems?
Boundary systems are components on the edges of an SAP landscape or other solution that interface with things outside the system, such as apps, services, or platforms.
Boundary systems are defined differently depending on the context. For an on-premise SAP landscape, for example, firewalls and other hardware that connect to the cloud could be considered boundary systems. However, there are also higher level boundary systems, such as the tools that automatically integrate your organization with its banking provider.
Boundary Challenge for Complex SAP Migrations
With a straightforward SAP migration from, say, SAP ERP to Suite on HANA, dealing with boundary systems isn’t a major challenge. Your team is dealing with a single suite of connected tools, with boundaries that are relatively easy to define.
But many companies undergoing SAP migration have to deal with greater complexity than this. They may have multiple platforms in different departments or regions that are interconnected. SAP users often opt to make their landscapes simpler and more agile by replacing third-party functionality with SAP HANA functionality in a migration. Essentially, that means they have to map multiple different systems, their connections to each other, and their connections to the outside world to the new landscape.
How should I Deal with Boundary Systems in an SAP Migration?
There’s no single answer. Your legacy systems and destination are different than any other company and require a unique approach to transformation. Fortunately, modern SAP Activate methodology and similar approaches to product management are very thorough — they involve multiple rounds of careful planning, testing and revision to make sure the final solution works as designed.
The key is to have a provider and a system that are up to the job. Protera CloudVantage ensures a fast, successful and secure HANA and S/4HANA migration by providing a unified toolset and methodology to execute the project.
FlexBridge is a single system that handles every aspect of your migration, from tracking and assigning tasks, to executing the minutiae of technical and functional transformation. That system is backed by our industry-leading technicians and 100% success rate, ensuring even the most complicated SAP migrations are delivered as planned and on time.
Contact us for a complimentary SAP migration readiness assessment.