Excerpt from First Steps in SAP® S/4HANA Finance by: Janet Salmon and Claus Wild
Chapter 6: Migrating to SAP S/4HANA Finance – Documenting a Migration
In Chapter 2, we learnt how the universal journal combines transactional data from Accounting and Controlling. If you are involved in a new SAP implementation, you can skip this chapter because your transactional data will be stored in the new structures from the start. However, if you are coming from an earlier release of SAP ERP, this chapter explains how to bring your existing transactional data, which is currently spread over several tables, into the new data model. We also look at how the migration removes the totals and index tables that we discussed in Chapter 1.
There are several parts to a migration project:
Blueprinting and defining how the new system should behave
Testing on a cloned system (you will generally repeat this around five times until all errors have been identified and fixed)
The migration proper using real data in the live system
The sign-off for the migration from your auditors
It is important to understand that this is not simply a technical upgrade but that the topics we discussed in Chapter 2 have a business impact: you will need business users as well as IT people to decide the configuration settings that make sense for your organization, to ensure that the correct master data is in place before you start enriching the existing data with profit centers, functional areas, and so on, and to sign-off on the consistency of the data after the migration.
Documenting a migration
In Chapter 2, we looked at the key fields for each application in the universal journal. Because the migrated data is subject to the normal audit requirements on financial data, it is important to understand how to identify a universal journal entry that has been migrated and to explain what type of line item you are dealing with. Indeed, you should involve your auditors in the project to ensure that your audit requirements are met during the migration. Figure 6.1 shows the migration-specific fields in the universal journal table.
Figure 6.1: Migration-specific fields in the universal journal
Continue reading > Documenting a Migration Part 2