SAP S/4HANA Migration: How PROS Helps Businesses Avoid Disruption and Get the Most from Their Data
Transitioning from on-premise SAP ECC to cloud-based S/4HANA may be difficult and time-consuming for B2B organizations, but it unlocks significant opportunities for digital transformation, further business growth and efficiency. With improved performance, real-time analytics, and an enhanced user experience, S/4HANA is a game-changer. Despite this, as of October 2024, only a third of customers have initiated or completed their migration*. Because this process involves not just technical upgrades but also significant changes in business processes, impacting nearly every department and employee.
In this article, we’ll dive into why migrating to S/4HANA is a golden opportunity for companies to rethink their business models and why those postponing the process can also modernize significantly their operations and IT infrastructure. We’ll also discuss why now is the perfect time to further enhance your technology with high-performance AI-powered solutions, maximizing your data’s potential and empowering the new SAP system to deliver greater value to your customers.
It’s a Good Time to Reevaluate Your Business Model and Operations.
Migrating to S/4HANA’s powerful cloud-based ERP is a significant investment for businesses to strengthen their infrastructure and overall system performance. This modernization offers improved scalability, flexibility, and integration capabilities. It’s also an ideal time to evaluate business operations and future goals, considering the technology that will best serve your company’s objectives over the next 10-15 years.
Large organizations handle vast amounts of business information, including transactional data (sales and purchase orders, prices, discounts), master data (customer and product details, price agreements, supplier info), and historical data. Successfully migrating all this information to a new cloud-based SAP system and leveraging it effectively in daily operations is crucial for smooth and efficient business processes. Integrating AI-powered pricing and selling solutions into your new tech stack will enable that holistic data utilization and connected pricing and selling workflows, enhancing your competitiveness and preparing your business for the most sophisticated buyer demands in digital selling.
That’s why the migration to S/4HANA is a great opportunity for B2B organizations to consider what pricing model will be a better fit for them depending on market conditions, operational needs, and the dynamic nature of their pricing strategies and sales channels used.
We call this “Just in Case” versus “Just in Time” pricing distribution.
“Just in Case” pricing is when our customers choose to maintain their pricing structure and logic within their ERP systems like SAP and periodically extract the necessary prices from PROS Smart Price Optimization and Management solution according to a set schedule. In this case PROS becomes the system of origin for pricing, which overwrites the prices in the ERP when the updates are made. This approach is typically better suited for businesses operating in less dynamic environments where pricing doesn’t need to be updated frequently. It’s often used in industries or channels where prices remain relatively constant over time, such as long-term contracts or products with low price volatility.
“Just in Time” pricing is for companies operating in more competitive markets where they leverage PROS as their system of record for all pricing data. This dynamic approach allows any system or digital platform that requires pricing information to directly query solution via our robust APIs. Unlike other vendors, PROS offers contractual SLAs around its high-performance real-time pricing capabilities to guarantee prices are updated and accessed in real time, ensuring that the latest pricing information is always available across sales channels used. This approach supports dynamic pricing strategies, allowing businesses to leverage best of breed pricing solutions with their SAP and quickly respond to market changes, competitor pricing, and customer demand. It’s ideal for industries with high price volatility, eCommerce and digital platforms, and companies that need to frequently adjust prices based on the latest market conditions. This approach also requires more sophisticated IT infrastructure and can be more challenging to implement initially, but it gives the business much higher flexibility to react.
Similarly, on the sales side, if you are looking to power your digital selling, launch new product or service and explore new markets, integrating PROS Smart CPQ into your new SAP system your company can easily offer products, services and bundles across all go-to-market channels – direct sales, partner, digital and eCommerce from a single catalog repository, while enabling consistent and personalized buying experiences for customers and tracking deal performance along the way.
Our industry-specific capabilities can additionally enhance your operations and SAP system. Distributors leveraging Smart CPQ manage spot buys and high-volume price agreements with up to 10,000-line product items, while maintaining profitability for the business. Manufacturers using PROS Smart CPQ handle complex product configurations with speed, ease and precision, providing their customers with sophisticated configure-for-order and engineer-for-order quotes.
PROS Smart POM and PROS Smart CPQ are CRM and ERP agnostic solutions. They can work seamlessly with not one, but multiple different CRM or ERP systems, eliminating the need for businesses to consolidate and choose a single system first. This is particularly beneficial for global organizations that have undergone multiple mergers and acquisitions throughout the years and may have many and more complex back-end solutions in place.
As an SAP partner for over 15 years, PROS offers significant value in the process of enhancing the pricing and selling capabilities of B2B organizations. Our dedicated SAP integration team has successfully completed hundreds of integrations, helping businesses in 40+ industries drive their digital pricing and selling initiatives, by transferring their data seamlessly and enhancing their ERP systems with AI-powered advanced capabilities. PROS certified integration content/connectors are available for both public and private cloud versions of SAP S4/HANA.
Waiting to Migrate? Decouple Your Pricing and Selling Capabilities from Your ERP to Drive Greater Performance.
Businesses that are postponing their migration shouldn’t postpone the potential revenue and margin gains that come with more powerful pricing capabilities.
If staying put with your existing on-premises SAP, but you feel you still need to make significant improvements to key business processes to drive success, you can achieve better, faster pricing performance by decoupling your pricing and selling capabilities from your ERP. Using an external AI-powered pricing solution like PROS Smart Price Optimization and Management can enhance pricing precision and speed without overhauling the entire ERP system. Likewise, a CPQ solution like PROS Smart Configure Price Quote can speed up sales cycles and increase win rates.
PROS offers SAP-certified content that facilitates seamless bi-directional integration between the legacy SAP system and the external AI-powered pricing and selling solutions. This improves the interoperability with SAP applications and reduces overall IT investment costs and risks. It also ensures that the pricing and selling information flows smoothly and efficiently between systems, enhancing overall performance and decision-making and keeping the business competitive to meet volatile market conditions.
If Your Business Needs More Energy Consider AI-Powered Pricing and Selling.
Case in point: A top 10 electrical manufacturer in the Fortune Global 500 switched from a competitor pricing solution to PROS Smart Pricing Optimization and Management several months after they migrated to S/4HANA. Their existing pricing model just couldn’t keep up with the constant increase in costs they were experiencing, and it was difficult to capture supply and demand volatility. As a result, the business was doing manual pricing guidance to keep up. They were also having general uptime problems and performance issues with the solution from the previous vendor.
By switching to PROS, now they have a pricing solution that leverages their new SAP system more effectively, meeting their business complexity and serving necessary use cases. The pricing team is now able to provide market-relevant AI-powered pricing to sales teams and support the commercial strategy more successfully. Among other benefits that they found particularly attractive in Smart POM are the in-depth pricing analytics with configurable charts to help pricing professionals understand and compare their pre- and post-pricing actions.
The new pricing software now provides guaranteed uptime performance, ensuring there’s no disruption for business operations.
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Learn more about PROS Connector for SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud.