IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA, a new approach designed to provide a smarter and faster way to digital transformations. Businesses across industries can look to accelerate the process of migrating existing SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA, enabling them to speed up the reinvention of core business processes and integration of new technology.

Arauco, a manufacturer of sustainable forest product solutions in Chile, is one of the first companies to benefit from the new capabilities.  IBM Services is working to upgrade and transform Arauco’s existing SAP systems across the company’s financial, procurement and production activities. By deploying IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA, Arauco anticipates achieving a reduction in time of up to 50% for certain activities during the project based on their specific environment and configurations, such as unicode conversion, generating significant time savings for the overall project.

“As we prepare for future growth, we needed to implement a digital platform that will streamline our processes through business transformation, including converting our existing SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA. Speed of deployment has been key to ensuring we experience the benefits of digital technology faster,” said Leandro San Miguel, CIO Arauco. “The IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA approach can help accelerate our modernization of processes, allowing us to deploy an integrated and consolidated financial reporting system across the business with SAP S/4HANA.”

Companies in every industry are reinventing their processes and operations with digital strategies enabled by new technologies, such as AI, automation and blockchain. SAP S/4HANA allows companies to simplify complex business processes while upgrading their technology infrastructure and enterprise systems resulting in greater efficiency and improved business outcomes.

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“Businesses working to transform themselves amid ongoing market disruption must consider how to convert and extend their existing investments, while at the same time capitalizing on the digital reinvention imperative,” said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Business Services and IBM Services. “With IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA, we’ve introduced an approach that helps simplify migration, enabling our clients to safely and securely move to the future at pace.”

Since forming the Digital Transformation partnership three years ago, IBM Services and SAP have worked together to provide services and capabilities that help accelerate how customers around the world modernize their systems and processes on their path to becoming an intelligent enterprise. The two companies continue to deliver new solutions that address rapidly changing market needs, including SAP Model Company services combined with enhanced industry specific pre-configured IBM Impact accelerators, which are designed to simplify the change process, speed-up innovation enabled by SAP S/4HANA and unlock business benefits faster. As announced late last year, IBM Services completed more than 100 SAP S/4HANA implementations.

IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA, complete with integrated delivery framework from SAP, including the SAP Value Assurance program and SAP Model Company service, helps accelerate migration to the SAP S/4HANA platform with minimal risk. This agile transformation approach offers more design and build flexibility that can deliver an enhanced user experience and automated business processes.  By taking advantage of IBM Rapid Move, businesses can also leverage and transform existing SAP investments without the need to fully redesign their legacy systems.

“The partnership between SAP and IBM continues to grow. With IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA, IBM is delivering an innovative way to give customers a major head start on their digital transformation projects and provide their clients with the ability to realize value from their deployments with even greater speed and agility,” said Michael Kleinemeier, member of the Executive Board and head of the SAP Digital Business Services organization, SAP SE.

IBM Services teamed up with transformation software company SNP to create a highly automated migration that combines the SAP management and technical expertise of the two companies.  IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA incorporates a hybrid transition approach to target process redesign and standardization, only where it is needed. IBM has embedded automation into the process leveraging “digital workers” that execute SAP S/4HANA configuration, code remediation and data reconciliation to reduce the complexity of implementation.

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“Almost every company deals with SAP S/4HANA and wants to tap into the opportunities of digital transformation,” says Dr. Andreas Schneider-Neureither, CEO SNP. “Working with IBM Services, we can now offer a simpler and faster way to take advantage of SAP S/4HANA. With the rapid adoption of SAP S/4HANA, companies accelerate their digital transformation and take advantage of the platform earlier than with traditional methods. This includes improving performance in complex and time-critical business processes such as real-time planning, execution, reporting, analytics and forecasting based on live data, as well as a personalized and simplified user experience across all business units, tasks and devices.”

SOURCE IBM