The Journey from SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA and the Composable Enterprise

I am leading SAP Modernization and Innovation journey projects. I understand the importance of having a clear understanding of the relationship between legacy SAP solutions and their modern counterparts. 

At Syscons Futura we leverage the map you will find below and I hope it will also be a valuable tool for you.

In the past few days, I also posted the blog titled “The Journey of SAP NetWeaver to SAP BTP“ with the correspondence that highlights the relationship between SAP NetWeaver to the latest SAP Business Technology solutions.

Introduction to SAP Business Suite
SAP Business Suite was of extreme success for two decades and at the core of the success of the SAP proposition. The new generation of SAP solutions are already terrific and widely adopted. The modernization, conversion, transformation are still a very relevant topic.

As of my knowledge, a non-exhaustive list of the SAP Business Suite main components includes:

SAP Enterprise Core Component (SAP ECC) | the ERP
SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM)
SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM)
SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM)
SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM)
Evolution towards the Composable Enterprise
According to a complete strategic simplification and optimization we do not find a simple and precise relationship between old and new. Typically, we find some functionalities consolidated into SAP S/4HANA and others promoted to a brand new cloud solution (SaaS).

I believe that evolution has been absolutely necessary to enable the Composable Enterprise. Coined by Gartner, the term is used to describe a “plug-in-play application architecture whereby the various components can be easily configured and reconfigured”.

Some example follow:

part of SAP Supply Chain Management  (SCM aka APO) is now superseded by SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for Planning and Scheduling Solution (MP&S) aka ePPDS. Other functionalities are instead well supported by SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)
A subset of SAP Customer Relationship Management is now included into SAP S/4HANA for Customer Management while other functionalities are well covered by SAP Customer Experience and SAP Service Cloud.
SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud aims to include the proposition of SAP MII and SAP ME.

Running in SAP BTP, SaaS, RISE and on-premise
As we can observe, several legacy and on-premise solutions have their new modern SaaS counterpart. In some cases it has been developed in a cloud native approach from scratch. In others it has the roots in an acquired product. 

Several new solutions are running in SAP BTP (e.g. SAP Digital Manufactory Cloud). Others, like SuccessFactors are pure SaaS still integrated but not directly running on SAP BTP.

Then there is SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public (SaaS) and RISE Private Cloud Edition.

On-premises seems still available only for SAP S/4HANA and some optional Edge appliance components useful for example in the IoT and Integration scenarios.

The Syscon Futura “SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA and the Cloud” Map
To illustrate the correspondences between SAP Business Suite and the new proposition, I’d like to share the map created by the Business Technology Team of Syscons Futura.

Although the map provides a summary and is not exhaustive, I believe it will greatly assist the SAP Learning Journey for the thousands of customers and consultants familiar with SAP Business Suite.


Conclusion
SAP Business Suite is now in sunset-mode and its End of Life is set for the end of 2027, with optional extended maintenance set for 2030. 

As we can see in the map, the new Composable Enterprise proposition surpasses SAP Business Suite in every aspect, offering a more comprehensive and advanced approach.