To reap the full benefits of cloud ERP, you must keep systems agile by following a clean core approach and keeping solutions up to date with the latest patches, feature packages (referred to as “updates” in this document) and releases (referred to as “upgrades” in this document). You must embrace a regular upgrade cadence to realize the value from innovations such as AI, to avoid costs for unnecessary custom code, and to maximize the lifetime of your systems. Unfortunately, the status quo across industries is still infrequent upgrading and inability to consume innovations in a timely manner.

Once a system has complexities such as proliferating process variants and inflexible custom code, you reach a point where you must act to protect your ability to innovate. Either you have to tidy up the system piecemeal—which is a difficult task rarely undertaken —or you need to implement a whole new system. Until then, the existing system is usually an innovation inhibitor. But a regular upgrade routine will ultimately make each single upgrade faster and cheaper—and sometimes even a “non-event."

Today, many organizations upgrade their ERP systems very infrequently after their expensive initial implementation project, and they regularly exceed maintenance windows. They may in fact keep using the release they initially installed for up to ten years. During this timeframe, IT organizations address requests to enable business innovation by adding “nuts and bolts” or “customization balconies”—essentially custom code. Even worse, lines of business may resort to their own best-of-breed solutions. This is a costly approach that results in a vicious cycle in which ever more complex IT solutions become ever more difficult to upgrade. IT teams come to lack knowledge and best practices related to upgrades, reusable project practices, and such helpful assets as test automation.

That means that you miss the opportunity to leverage the innovations, which come with every new release of SAP standard functionality and may well address known line-of-business requests. Specifically for an IT organization, this holds tremendous potential to change its role from a reactive, sometimes slow enabler of stopgap innovation to a driving force and leader in strategic innovation.

In public cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP systems such as those you can build with the GROW with SAP offering, SAP as a software provider is responsible for driving upgrades and ensuring business continuity. Customers have less flexibility in customizing and extending their systems. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition as part of the RISE with SAP offering, customers gain flexibility related to configurations and extensions. This also means that release upgrades and updates still require careful customer-specific planning, preparation, and execution to ensure business continuity.

And the end-to-end responsibility for updates and upgrades remains with customers. SAP takes care of executing the technical tasks and offers a wealth of services, assets, and tools to assist our RISE with SAP customers with their updates and upgrades.

This document is designed to help IT leaders on their journey to regular upgrades. It summarizes the benefits of regular upgrades and SAP-recommended best practices and guidance for RISE with SAP customers. It also includes high-level guidance on how to build regular update and upgrade routines, with links to a wealth of more detailed assets and tools.

Maximize innovation potential with regular upgrades

Changing your organization’s update and upgrade mindset and approach holds tremendous potential for unlocking agility and innovation. An ERP system that is always running the latest release and leveraging the latest SAP standard innovations is the alternative to costly, one-time implementation projects of inflexible customer-specific solutions that age quickly. With a system that is regularly upgraded, you can realize the benefits of the latest innovations and UI technologies, including AI and sustainability features.

By applying updates and upgrades regularly, you also ensure that your ERP system stays secure, compliant, agile, and stable. When updates and upgrades are part of a habitual procedure, each one becomes faster and easier for your organization. Don’t wait for push factors like outdated technology, limited scalability, inadequate data reporting and analysis capabilities, or lack of support for mobile devices to make the need to upgrade obvious—and more far-reaching change inevitable.

In the following sections, we cover the major innovations available in the latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition that make it a compelling upgrade for unlocking business value.

Increase differentiation with new features in SAP S/4HANA

In the current world, businesses cannot rely on a unique selling point for their success. You must be proactive on all fronts to remain relevant, with technology a pivotal pillar for stimulating growth. The latest capabilities and technologies empower your organization to stay a step ahead of the competition and utilize the opportunities presented by the global market. Each release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition comes with a new set of capabilities bringing simplification, innovation, and automation to you and your end users. As part of your RISE with SAP contract, you are paying for those innovations, so it makes sense to take advantage of them by regularly upgrading and always running the latest release.

Highlighting key innovations

In recent releases, we’ve introduced a wide range of application innovations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition across all lines of business. These major innovations significantly enhance older releases of SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP. For details see the What’s New Viewer, our blogs about S/4HANA Cloud Release Highlights in 2023 and 2022, or the SAP Community. Our road map for future releases evolves around the key themes of intelligent cloud ERP, AI integration, and sustainability.

Understanding new supply chain highlights

In the realm of supply chain, advanced shipping and receiving simplifies communication among such functions as transportation management, extended warehouse management, stock room management, inventory management, physical inventory, and logistics execution. The newly simplified transportation management and extended warehouse management integrations also support multiple warehouses within a single freight order. And they help you coordinate the whole process from arrival of trucks at the gate to final goods receipt in the warehouse. The supply creation-based (SBC) confirmation feature significantly enhances the availability check in sales orders. It is typically used in manufacturing industries, especially in make-to-order and assemble-to order scenarios when there is not enough stock in the warehouse to fill the order. Using SBC during the available-to-promise check, you can create supply elements for a multilevel bill of materials—with resource scheduling and reservations on capacities—to immediately cover the sales order requirements when there is not enough supply available in the system. Furthermore, the greenhouse gas emission feature lets you set thresholds for CO2 emissions per vehicle type to foster optimization and provide insights into sustainability. See Figure 1 for a sample of calculated emissions data.

Understanding new service highlights

In the service realm, the new service with advanced execution helps you plan, execute, and bill services for complex assets or long-running services with multiple billing cycles. It supports service processes with longer service cycles and complex technical projects that require extensive planning and execution.

The core characteristic of this service is the integration of the commercial aspects of service with the planning and execution capabilities of maintenance management. The enhancement of maintenance management lets you use the task list you’re familiar with from the plant maintenance module of the SAP ERP ECC and SAP S/4HANA to represent complex maintenance operations and activities for such assets as industrial equipment and pieces of machinery. Additionally, you can implement a cost-plus commercial arrangement, in which the end customer is charged for a service based on the actual cost of activities plus a surplus or margin on top, as with dynamic item processing or resource-related billing.

We also introduced new item-based accounting to deal with revenues and costs for service processes. This feature offers you an opportunity for real-time margin analysis before month-end financial closing and revenue recognition, based on enhanced event-based revenue recognition.

Understanding new asset management highlights

In asset management, we’ve delivered many innovations to help close the gap between asset strategy and asset execution. The SAP Asset Performance Management (SAP APM) application provides asset health insights from operational data and analytics and helps you craft cost-effective asset performance strategies for various asset classes. SAP APM and SAP S/4HANA work as a single system, so you can now carry strategic insights directly into actual maintenance execution. Your maintenance teams can now carry out various maintenance strategies appropriate for the criticality and class of the asset. And they can optimize reliability and maintenance costs and measure efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance programs for continuous improvement.

Understanding new sales highlights

To enhance sales functions, we’ve added many innovations to help you automate sales order processes and make them more intelligent and efficient. Low-touch sales order processing increases the sales team’s efficiency and productivity.

A key new feature is the automatic creation of sales orders from unstructured data, such as purchase orders in PDF or image formats. It works in conjunction with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, the SAP Build Process Automation solution, and the Document Information Extraction service, part of SAP AI Services. Sales representatives can import documents in XLSX format from Microsoft Excel to create sales orders, sales quotations, sales contracts, or scheduling agreements.

Additionally, the new advanced intercompany sales process allows two affiliated companies to participate in a single intercompany process, as when a local sales office sells to a customer and the producing company delivers the goods directly to the customer, or a local sales organization sells to a customer and a central warehouse delivers the goods. Figure 2 illustrates an example of the process flow in intercompany sales.

Understanding new finance highlights

In finance, SAP has supported parallel accounting for some time, initially using parallel accounts and later parallel ledgers. However, these solutions had some shortcomings, since currencies and ledgers were not consistently supported across the material ledger and controlling and asset accounting functions. Now a new system for universal parallel accounting (UPA) provides a harmonized architecture for ledgers and currencies, offering a foundation for calculating and posting values per ledger and currency along end-to-end processes. UPA is also the baseline for future innovations in finance, such as value chain analysis and transactional carbon accounting.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enhance the integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for group reporting, the SAP Advanced Financial Closing Solution, and SAP Analytics Cloud to accelerate digital transformation in finance.

Understanding new manufacturing highlights

In manufacturing, we have made improvements to the material requirements planning (MRP) functionality for “MRP Live,” predictive MRP, demand-driven MRP, and collaborative MRP. “MRP Live” provides significant performance improvements, including planning cycles shortened to run multiple times a day and cross-plant planning. Up-to-date supply and demand information provides the basis for smarter decisions that match demand and supply more efficiently and serves as the foundation for predictive MRP. Predictive MRP helps you leverage capacity planning to predict and simulate capacity constraints based on current MRP results, resolving potential capacity and material gaps in a plant before they occur. Demand-driven MRP helps buffer inventory based on target levels in strategic locations, with replenishment triggered based on the average consumption over the lead time. Collaborative MRP lets you run MRP passes in real time and visualize results, identifying potential material bottlenecks and using simulations to investigate ways to resolve them. You can also collaborate with suppliers on short-notice changes and receive instant feedback through the SAP Business Network for Procurement.

Other MRP types control consumption-based planning through parameters for qualified demand, qualified supply, safety stock, lot size, and reorder point.

Understanding new sourcing and procurement highlights

In recent releases, we’ve also made many investments in central procurement and product sourcing, introducing for example a concept called lean services. You can now integrate the lean service for purchasing, a simplified process in operational procurement to manage the purchase of planned and unplanned external services, through networks in the project management system of the component product lifecycle. See Lean Service Enablement for Project Networks in the SAP Community for further detail.

Enhancing the user interface to boost productivity and flexibility

Regular upgrades also allow you to boost user productivity by modernizing the user experience (UX). Each SAP S/4HANA release introduces approximately 300 new apps in the SAP Fiori user experience to support improvements in processes, intelligent use cases, UX features, usability, and performance. You can simplify change management for your business users through the context-sensitive help tutorials, in-app guided tours, and terminology explanations that come with each release. And you can optionally refine this content using the SAP Enable Now solution. For your support team, improvements in tooling and extension capabilities for clean core initiatives simplify and reduce the effort of launchpad administration with each update.

Overall, SAP Fiori allows you to gain productivity, reduce training costs and user errors, and improve time to value for your business processes compared to classic user interfaces built using SAP GUI for HTML and ABAP Web Dynpro. For more details on the measurable value of SAP Fiori, plug your specific scenario into the SAP UX value calculator.

Considering your specific UX issues

When you begin your upgrade, consider where shortcomings in UX performance in your system lower user productivity. This helps you identify opportunities for SAP Fiori-based improvements. Use the SAP Activate methodology for UX adoption planning to get started.

Tallying UX improvements from recent SAP S/4HANA releases

The following list summarizes some of the latest changes to SAP Fiori:

• A new My Home page from SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 on, as illustrated in Figure 3 and discussed in User Experience Advances with SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 (Private Cloud and On-Premises)
• Sharing to Microsoft Teams as detailed in User Experience Advances with SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 (Private Cloud and On-Premises)
• Spaces and pages help you make sense of your business using a hierarchy with multiple tile types, personalized sort through pinned spaces, and merging of spaces and pages for users in multiple business roles, as discussed in Getting Started with Spaces and Pages and Merging Spaces and Pages
• Several improvements to address use cases for situation handling that grew rapidly from 20 in SAP S/4HANA 1909 to 125 in SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01, including functionality to let you create your own custom situations, as shown in the blogs How to Start with Custom Situations and Custom Situation Cases: Configure Your Own Use Cases
• A new embedded analytical app type “review booklet,” as detailed in Review Booklet for Group Financial Statements (Version 2.0)
• A system information toolbar, so when users develop key user extensions or perform testing they always know which system they’re working in, as discussed in User Experience Advances with SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 (Private Cloud and On-Premises)
• Live guided tours when executing an app, quick tours that automatically appear for first-time users, and revisions as shown in SAP Fiori: Tips and Tricks for Users of SAP S/4HANA
• Read-only review tools for sharing launchpad content and layout details with your audit team and other business stakeholders, as detailed in SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – 3 simple use cases for Launchpad Content Aggregator
• Support for composite security roles in launchpad content and layout tools, including exposure of composite roles to SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, as discussed in SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA - Composite Roles in launchpad content and layout tools

Enhancing apps usage

With each upgrade, you benefit from improvements applied to your current usage of SAP Fiori apps, including performance enhancements to application floorplan behaviors, underlying data extraction by means of CDS views and virtual data models, and Web browser rendering through the SAPUI5 framework. With many releases of SAP S/4HANA, new SAP Fiori launchpad configuration options let you centrally control “every user” features that affect performance.

Other examples of benefits from upgrading include enabling more SAP Fiori apps to take advantage of OData V4 services, which provide enhanced performance through such features as lazy loading. You also gain tighter metadata compression that saves from 10% to 60% of your data volume, as well as advanced querying, sorting, and filter mechanisms and support for multi-level expands, which reduce the number of calls and the data volume being transferred.

The SAPUI5 framework, which is the technology that implements SAP Fiori apps, has been steadily evolving. It now offers, for example, features in browser development such as support for modern ECMAScript that enables applications to run faster and to embrace emerging Web standards. In recent releases, and particularly with SAPUI5 1.120—the SAPUI5 version for SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 and higher—a significant number of improvements have been introduced. You can find notes on these and many more in the SAPUI5 What’s New Viewer. For architects and developers, Best Practices for Developers in the SAPUI5 Demo Kit offers practical guidance to keep custom-built applications future-proof.

If you are running an older release of SAP S/4HANA and using SAP Fiori, performance and stability problems may be related to known issues in the performance of individual apps. Those have likely been resolved in current releases of SAP Fiori. For more information on the kinds of issues that you might face and how to avoid them, see SAP community blogs such as SAP Fiori Peak Performance – Introduction and Top 10 Ways to Prevent Performance Issues.

If you are running a lower release than SAP S/4HANA 2020, use the upgrade as an opportunity to also declutter user SAP Fiori launchpads and shorten loading times to gain benefits in performance and stability. Check the blog post about recommendations regarding structuring roles, spaces and pages in the SAP Fiori Launchpad based on common user behaviors.

Phasing out the use of a hub server for SAP Fiori

Lastly, if you’ve deployed your SAP Fiori landscape initially on a hub or “stand-alone” server, we highly recommend you move to an embedded deployment with your next upgrade. SAP Fiori front-end server 2023 is the last SAP Fiori front-end server version that can be used stand-alone. Embedded deployment has been recommended since 2017 for SAP S/4HANA, and stand-alone deployment will no longer be supported from SAP S/4HANA 2025 on.

One of the core benefits of the embedded deployment is a measurable performance improvement through removal of RFC overhead between the front- and back-end systems for service calls. This brings you better stability and reduced IT landscape costs, since there are fewer systems for your basis teams to manage. For more details, see SAP Fiori Deployment Options and System Landscape Recommendations and Migrate SAP Fiori Front-End Server from Stand-Alone to Embedded System Deployment.

Extending benefits to other GUIs

The improvements in performance and stability for SAP Fiori also apply to classic user interfaces built using SAP GUI for HTML and ABAP Web Dynpro. Improvements for these technologies and frameworks through SAP kernel and unified rendering patches directly benefit you even if you retain SAP GUI as your primary user interface.

Innovating with SAP Business Technology Platform

If you subscribe to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, each SAP S/4HANA release provides extended integration through SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). SAP BTP is designed to run all your SAP cloud solutions, AI use cases, and augmented analytics seamlessly, along with extended options for your custom use cases.

Notable examples include:

• The launchpad for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition to provide a unified entry point across SAP S/4HANA, your SAP cloud solutions, and your custom applications built on SAP BTP, as explained in What Is SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition?
• The SAP Mobile Start app as a native entry point to your launchpad on Apple and Android devices, including smartphones, Apple smartwatches, and Apple Vision Pro, as shown in Apple Vision Pro is available – SAP Mobile Start V1.10 is ready
• The SAP Task Center service as a unified approvals inbox across workflows from SAP S/4HANA, other SAP SaaS solutions, and custom workflows built with the SAP Build Process Automation solution, as described in the SAP Task Center one-page summary
• Intelligent Situation Automation service for handling common business exceptions, as discussed in Intelligent Situation Automation – The next big step in Digital Transformation
• Smooth integration of SAP Analytics Cloud stories and augmented analytics capabilities

Streamlining business processes with AI and Joule

The rise of generative AI marks a new era beyond simple machine language technology. AI-powered processes and user experience in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition are paving the way to a new world of accelerated business, faster decision-making, and exponentially greater productivity. Regular upgrades of your SAP solutions ensure that you can always leverage the latest AI innovations.

Harnessing Joule, the AI copilot from SAP

Joule provides intelligent answers drawn from your wealth of underlying SAP business data, preserving business context while guarding customer privacy The copilot helps you:

• Revolutionize each interaction, making every touchpoint count and simplifying every task
• Lead more productive business interactions using natural language for informational, navigational, and transactional assistance
• Gain smarter insights grounded in underlying business data and enriched by business context

For details on how to access and activate Joule, see the SAP Community Web site for the note on Joule for SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition - A Comprehensive Setup Guide.

Furthering growth and innovation with AI

A few of the many ways AI helps you foster innovation across lines of business include:

• Achieving improved finance excellence that helps optimize working capital management and period-closing processes
• Supporting operational excellence through elevated product quality and optimized manufacturing and asset performance
• Enhancing intelligent order fulfillment by streamlining and automating the full process

For details on SAP Business AI solutions for cloud ERP, see Artificial Intelligence for ERP and Finance | SAP Business AI.

Fostering security and compliance

Deliveries of SAP software do more than provide new functionality and enhancements. They also include the latest security updates on all levels, including authentication and authorization corrections. But SAP guarantees security corrections only for feature and support package stacks dated within the last two years. So to avoid security-related issues, you should run on a feature or support package no older than two years. Additionally, new security features are typically shipped in the latest versions only. For example, SAP introduced OpenID Connect support with the SAP S/4HANA 2021 release, and Transport Layer Security 1.3 from SAP S/4HANA 2023 on.

Promoting database-level security

Security plays a role not only at the level of SAP S/4HANA level but also regarding the underlying database, which you should keep current with regular updates. For the SAP HANA database, SAP introduced more secure integration features such as the SAP Data Custodian Key Management service starting with SP06, for example, and this solution itself has since been replaced by the SAP Key Management service.

Keeping current with updates is also critical for staying compliant with country and industry regulations for such functions as tax reporting, statutory reporting, and interactions between business and government. SAP adds features related to those areas and requirements with every shipment.

Replacing compatibility scope functionality with genuine SAP S/4HANA solutions

SAP provides limited use rights for certain classic SAP ERP functionalities in SAP S/4HANA on premises and in the private cloud. Most of these “compatibility scope” use rights expire automatically on December 31, 2025, for all SAP S/4HANA releases. With the 2023 release of SAP S/4HANA, SAP has shipped go-to solutions as replacements for the compatibility packs ending in 2025, many non-disruptive. SAP strongly recommends that you investigate your compatibility scope usage and the appropriate substitutes right away, so that you can bring the go-to solutions live by the end of 2025.

Continued productive usage of expired compatibility scope functionalities could mean commercial noncompliance and a high risk in IT audits, through attempted production usage of non-licensed and non-supported software.

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Call to action for SAP S/4HANA customers: Compatibility packs

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Compatibility packs in S4: The way forward in detail 💫

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Compatibility Scope: What happens after 2025/2030

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SAP Note 2269324

Increasing performance and stability

End user expectations have increased rapidly over recent years, and you rightly demand optimal performance from today’s systems, since they must be prepared to meet the high scalability requirements of modern business. From every release of SAP S/4HANA, as users start to use functionality at scale, SAP learns which applications have performance considerations and tunes them to address issues as they surface. Performing an upgrade means that you don’t need to live with known performance limitations. It also means that the latest lessons SAP has learned in terms of our frameworks and programming models are always applied to your system, giving you the best performance possible.

In general, the applications mentioned in the SAP Note regarding known performance limitations show higher than expected response times in terms of SAP HANA CPU time and application server CPU time. The resolution of these issues is available with further SAP S/4HANA feature packs—a tangible benefit to performing regular system updates.

Also included with each release of SAP S/4HANA are performance tuning and improvements for the SAP HANA database as outlined in SAP Notes such as 2689405 – FAQ: SAP S/4HANA Performance Best Practices - Collective SAP Note. Improvements such as new parameters and enhancements help you improve the response times of your business processes from end to end.

New releases bring not only new features but also innovations that help manage performance. And systems that are updated regularly are easier to support, enabling much shorter ticket resolution times in dealings with the SAP Customer Support organization.

Forming a habit of regular upgrades

Upgrading regularly makes planning and executing each upgrade much easier. We recommend making regular upgrades every two years, an integral part of your IT calendar to eliminate the effort of planning and budgeting each upgrade separately.

Our analysis of customer upgrade behavior shows that upgrades at least every two years also correlate with shorter project durations. For customers who upgraded regularly, typically every year or every other year, the average duration of an upgrade project was four months, as opposed to six months for customers who upgraded less frequently.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the positive effects of regular upgrades on the experience, knowledge, and skills of your IT team. Regularly upgrading your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition systems equips your team with solid know-how for the upgrade process itself. They become more skilled at engaging with SAP for technical upgrades, creating the project plan, engaging with your business users for testing, reviewing innovation adoption, and so on. Naturally, this results in smoother upgrade projects, and in fact customers who upgrade regularly tell us about fewer disruptions in their projects. Training for regular upgrades is like training a muscle for sports: repeated exercise leads to better performance.

Furthermore, testing represents about 50% of project costs during an upgrade, so when you can re-use test plans and automate your testing, you can enormously reduce testing efforts and project costs.

Increasing business value through regular upgrades

Upgrading an ERP system requires significant investments in time, effort, and cost. While each company's specific circumstances vary, the decision to upgrade or replace a system always hinges on a compelling business case. IT organizations need to justify such investments to secure the required resources, so they must quantify the benefits of regular updates and upgrades. In the case of single updates or upgrades, some organizations integrate them into broader modernization plans, but this approach is not suitable for driving regular updates and upgrades independent from evolving business situations. SAP can help you build a financial business case for regular updates and upgrades that are tailored to your organization. Just reach out to your account executive or customer success partner to discuss available services.

At a high level, your most important source of value is the ability of your business to accelerate the consumption of innovations—or rather recoup the opportunity cost of missing out on innovations. SAP invests over US$6 billion in R&D every year, and a substantial part of that goes into developments related to SAP S/4HANA. This investment shows up in the number of standard innovations made available to our customers every year. If you don’t upgrade regularly, you’re losing out on the value these innovations can incrementally bring to your business, as shown in Figure 4. Even worse, you may waste money developing and maintaining custom code for business processes or features that can be addressed by SAP standard functionality in newer releases.

A great example of an SAP customer who leverages the power of regular upgrades is Hitachi High-Tech. By adopting SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and a clean core approach, they have changed their routine to upgrading every two years and updating with the latest feature and support packages yearly. They’ve since managed to reduce the duration of a typical upgrade project to a single month.

Building your regular upgrade routine

The path to regular upgrades starts with the right strategy, governance, and planning. In this section, we provide high-level guidance on these aspects, followed by recommendations for building update and upgrade skills in your organization and step-by-step procedures for update and upgrade projects.

Establishing robust governance and planning

To establish a regular update and upgrade routine, you need the right governance and planning. Make updates and upgrades an integral part of your planning cycles by following the steps in this section.

Understanding the release strategy behind SAP products

Each SAP product follows its own release strategy. Staying updated on product releases and release strategies is crucial, since it helps determine when specific functionalities will be available and which time of the year is most suitable for particular system upgrades or updates.

For SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, SAP established a yearly delivery of new releases with two feature packages in between with the launch of SAP S/4HANA in 2015. Through 2022, SAP delivered nine SAP S/4HANA releases with numerous innovations and simplifications. With the release of SAP S/4HANA 2023, we reached the next level of product maturity by completing compatibility package alternatives and concluding major overhauls. At this point, we decided to take the next evolutionary step in our release strategy. Since SAP S/4HANA 2023, new releases are delivered every second year, with three feature packages in between. Along with this change in release frequency, illustrated in Figure 5, SAP extended the mainstream maintenance period from five to seven years from SAP S/4HANA 2023 on.

You can take advantage of the transparency and regularity of SAP’s release schedule to align your IT change management and business release strategy, as well as your project schedule, with SAP S/4HANA release timelines.

The two-year release cycle comes with an extended period of easier-to-consume innovation made available through feature packages. Feature package updates usually have shorter project durations and less complexity than release upgrades, since essential technology components such as the ABAP platform, UI5 technology versions, and the SAP HANA database remain stable in feature packages. Moreover, with feature package updates you typically don’t need to update or upgrade software add-ons.

On the application level, SAP strives for a minimally disruptive approach, avoiding impact on Day 1 whenever possible. For example, technical objects such as transactions, SAP Fiori apps, APIs, or CDS views are not removed or made unavailable with feature packages. This happens only with major releases and after the constraints have been announced at least one year ahead of time. In order not to miss out on such announcements, please regularly check for deprecation announcements with new feature packages and releases in the SAP What’s New Viewer.

For any changes that do require your attention in an update project, SAP uses well-established approaches such as “simplification item” checks or silent data migration to prevent business disruptions. We made the Software Update Manager (SUM) tool mandatory for feature package updates as of SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS02 to make sure you don’t miss out on using these aids.

Designating a fixed time period for upgrades

Defining your timeline for an upgrade or update is key, especially since this activity can take a few months. You’ll need to choose a substantial period of time when resources are readily available and there are no other significant organizational commitments, such as quarter-end or year-end activities, or concurrent development projects.

The right upgrade frequency for your organization depends on a range of factors. From a legal perspective, your RISE with SAP contract requires that you stay in mainstream maintenance with your SAP systems, which defines the maximum allowable range of time between upgrades. However, we strongly advise against waiting those seven years before moving to a new release, for all the reasons laid out earlier. SAP recommends you always run the latest release or at least only one below the latest. Many customers have already adopted this best practice and apply a two-year cycle for upgrading their system.

You might also consider decoupling technical upgrades from the implementation of new features. The main purpose of new software versions is to deliver innovations for business and technology. Therefore, we strongly recommend evaluating new functions, features, and technology enhancements for each new release and defining a clear road map for adopting all those innovations. From a project planning and execution perspective, it can be beneficial to implement the technical software upgrade and the business enhancements in separate projects with separate go-lives.

At first, this may sound contradictory and there may sometimes be good reasons to implement new applications or processes together with the technical upgrade. However, SAP S/4HANA technical upgrades are well-defined procedures supported by robust tools and a high degree of automation. And the experience of many SAP customers shows that these upgrades can be accomplished quite fast—particularly if the IT team is well trained in performing upgrades. Functional implementations, on the other hand, are usually one-time events with customer-specific constraints that can lead to project delays. If functional implementation is part of an upgrade project, such issues may slow down the complete project and the overall upgrade. Therefore, as you begin to establish a routine of regular updates, you may want to consider separating technical upgrades from implementation of new functionalities. Then, if both projects run in parallel as much as possible—for example, the implementation project for new functionalities starts as soon as the development system has been upgraded—such an approach can ultimately even speed up innovation adoption.

Balancing upgrades with other projects

Frequently, upgrades get sidelined and delayed because other ongoing projects take precedence. This unfortunate trend can be reversed by publishing the benefits of the annual upgrade or update schedule across the organization. Once all stakeholders understand what the organization stands to gain by always running the latest release, they can more willingly accommodate the timeline for periodic upgrades and strategically plan projects to align with it. They also need to grasp how upgrades are coordinated through the use of a development freeze window and transport blocks.

Understanding dependencies across solutions

Assessing the ways in which the many solutions in your environment depend on one another is crucial to planning upgrades. A clear comprehension of cross-landscape dependencies helps you determine the proper sequence in which to upgrade your solutions.

The higher the criticality of the system to overall business continuity, the higher its priority for upgrading—or perhaps for leaving untouched. Certainly, upgrades and updates may also be prioritized to respond to functional or performance issues that need quick resolution.

Considering use of a sandbox

Evaluating the upgrade path for your landscape is essential before every system upgrade, since identifying top-priority landscape requirements can streamline the process. For instance, if your organization consistently engages in projects within the SAP S/4HANA system landscape, opting for an extra landscape tier for the SAP S/4HANA solution can support both business as usual and upgrade project activities. Similarly, if your release strategy includes a sandbox cycle for thorough testing but you don’t require a sandbox throughout the year, consider scheduling the acquisition of a temporary sandbox before the upgrade project begins.

Developing an overall upgrade road map for your IT environment

Best practice suggests developing a road map such as the one illustrated in Figure 6 to detail the sequence and schedule for updates and upgrades across all solutions. By considering cross-landscape dependencies, the priority and complexity of existing solutions, and your requirements for custom projects, you can establish an annual calendar for these recurring activities. Staggering system upgrades throughout the year in a fixed sequence and maintaining a consistent schedule make the most sense.

Planning each system landscape upgrade in detail

Conducting thorough technical and functional evaluations for each system landscape upgrade or update is imperative. Meticulous planning and coordination among teams helps guarantee your ability to adhere to the yearly plan. It’s important to consider the issue of business downtime early in your upgrade planning. Depending on the size and nature of their business, organizations have varying tolerances for business downtime during updates and upgrades. You need to factor your organization's specific requirements in this regard into your planning.

RISE with SAP customers benefit from a range of preconfigured optimization measures for technical downtime. The near-zero downtime maintenance approach is applied by default for all RISE with SAP upgrades. To optimize business downtime beyond the technical downtime, try selecting individual solutions to automate and parallelize IT administrative tasks and testing. Services available from SAP and SAP partners can help.

Using helpful tools and guidance from SAP

Leverage best practice guidance in RISE with SAP Methodology

Many companies have taken advantage of the flexibility of ERP systems to extend them in various ways to meet specific business needs. While these customized extensions made business sense in the past, maintaining them now can become time-consuming and costly, particularly during system upgrades. SAP's clean core principles, illustrated in Figure 7, offer a framework for developing and managing extensions in the cloud, ensuring that your system remains upgradable with the lowest possible effort. New extensions developed in adherence to clean core principles stay easily upgradable, saving you time and money.

The RISE with SAP methodology is designed to help customers apply the clean core principles during their transformation to cloud ERP and with succeeding upgrades, as documented in RISE with SAP | ERP Clean Core Strategy. The methodology also delivers additional best practice guidance and expert advice at every stage of your transformation journey.

When you adopt RISE with SAP, you receive a dedicated onboarding advisor from SAP who helps the project team set up shop and develop the clean core success plan. At the end of each project phase, quality gates help ensure adherence to the success plan and your clean core principles. The advisor teaches your team how to provide input for the initial quality gate, and based on quality gate findings, additional SAP experts offer feedback and recommendations for subsequent activities.

In addition to the onboarding advisors, online webinars with guided enablement sessions and time for Q&A, along with a vast framework of recorded enablement sessions, provide additional clarity on how to run the tasks in each project phase.

For more information on RISE with SAP, see RISE with SAP | Migration and Modernization.

Using SAP Readiness Check to reduce upgrade complexity

The tool called the SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA discussed in the SAP Community provides a self-service method for checking the readiness of your existing SAP S/4HANA for an upgrade to a selected target SAP S/4HANA release, including feature package stack or support package stack. The tool gives you an indication of the required effort to get ready and to complete the upgrade. SAP Readiness Check is available for customers with an active SAP maintenance contract and is accessible through SAP for Me, or through SAP Cloud ALM.

SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA helps you perform a set of functional and technical assessments to scope and plan an upgrade project. The analysis helps identify areas of focus as early as possible, to avoid hidden project risks and preserve the planned budget and timeline. You can identify mandatory preparatory steps and possible adjustments for your system well before the upgrade project starts. There could be, for example, simplification items requiring attention, impacted interfaces needing remediation, or deprecated or unavailable applications requiring the adoption of a successor. This early insight means that you can scope your upgrade project with a higher degree of accuracy.

We recommend running SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades in your production system during the Discover phase or early in the Prepare phase of the SAP Activate methodology for project planning, which we discuss in detail later in this document. The dashboard view pictured in Figure 8 helps you identify the impact of planned changes on your business processes, so you have sufficient time to address it proactively.

The following checks are available in the SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades:

• Simplification items
  As with the conversion from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, in which you had to deal with many simplification items to prepare for the project, current maintenance strategy includes a few simplification items with every release and feature package of SAP S/4HANA. Every feature package renews various modules and processes, resulting in a small number of new simplification items. SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades shows you relevant simplification items based on your source and target release, including the feature package stack.
• Compatibility scope analysis
  The compatibility scope analysis highlights the compatibility packages you use, to help you plan the migration to successor solutions before the compatibility package usage rights expire. Most expire at the end of 2025, and a few at the end of 2030. Check your contract for the date that applies to you.
• App availability
  Before you start an upgrade, you should validate the availability of UI elements used in the target SAP S/4HANA release. Leveraging the SAP Fiori Upgrade Impact Analysis in the accelerator section of the SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library and based on system usage statistics, this check identifies apps that use technology types SAP GUI, SAP Fiori, and Web Dynpro in the source system, as shown in Figure 9.

• Recommended SAP Fiori apps
  In this section, you can find SAP Fiori apps that have been identified as beneficial for your target system based on the business processes and transactions already present. For an overview of available apps, see the Product Tour for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. This document highlights many apps that provide immediate business benefits to a range of popular functional areas. The SAP Signavio Process Navigator solution and the SAP Signavio Process Insights solution provide detailed recommendations for apps that align with your line-of-business processes.
• Custom code analysis
  The custom code analysis in SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades supports the baseline analysis feature available within the ABAP test cockpit. The readiness check compares the baseline analysis of the as-is system to the target system and then leverages it in a subsequent run of the ABAP test cockpit to exclude any findings from a previous SAP ERP conversion or SAP S/4HANA upgrade project. A sample of the resulting report appears in Figure 10.

• Add-on compatibility
  Incompatible add-ons can be showstoppers for your SAP S/4HANA upgrade. Upgrades to standard SAP add-ons are delivered as part of the SAP S/4HANA release. Any add-ons installed in the source system that are not yet supported in the target release will be shown as incompatible. If any third-party software present in the landscape requires an update as part of the upgrade, you may need to contact your third-party vendor to check on the status and expected delivery date for an update.
• Integration
  This section of the readiness check provides a list of interfaces you use, automates otherwise tedious analysis, cross-checks with various data sources, and identifies interfaces that may no longer function as expected following the upgrade between SAP S/4HANA releases.

The SAP S/4HANA upgrade solutions developed by the SAP Innovative Business Solutions organization need to be checked for compatibility with your target SAP S/4HANA release and maintenance contract.

Additional features of SAP Readiness Check include business case story cards, which highlight the innovation potential in your specific SAP S/4HANA system. This assessment is based on quantitative characteristics derived from the performance of your business processes. If the quantitative characteristics exceed a defined threshold, the corresponding card is active, and you can open it to find information about the system's current situation and the identified innovation potential.

The “Learn More” side panel in SAP Readiness Check provides information and possible next steps for each check. A Web assistant helps you navigate the dashboard and use features such as downloading the SAP Readiness Check results.

Stay informed

Visit the SAP Readiness Portal

Information on SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades

Join our SAP Readiness Check Community

Information on new and updated capabilities

Identifying optimization opportunities with business transformation management

Our SAP Business Transformation Management portfolio, which includes the SAP Signavio solutions, the SAP LeanIX solution, the SAP Cloud ALM solution, and the SAP Enable Now solution, is suitable for large-scale transformation projects such as updates and upgrades of existing systems. The solutions in the portfolio can help you upgrade with greater visibility, better collaboration, and reduced risk.

SAP Signavio examines and analyses current business processes and identifies areas that can be optimized. SAP LeanIX helps you develop the new technical architecture to support new processes. Once the new processes and supporting technology are designed, SAP Cloud ALM helps with implementation and SAP Enable Now with employee enablement. By combining all these solutions into our business transformation approach, SAP enables organizations to manage the complexity of a large-scale ERP transformation and initiate operational change.

For SAP S/4HANA upgrades, you can simulate the impact of improvements or changes available with the new version and their impact upfront. Then you can understand the requirements for training or enablement, for example at the business process level. Our benchmarking and analytics capabilities help you understand the new business value or efficiency gains that upgraded SAP ERP versions or innovations such as AI can bring to your organization.

Managing updates and upgrades with SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Cloud ALM helps you effectively manage upgrades throughout their entire lifecycle. It offers project planning, testing, change management, and end-to-end monitoring functionality. SAP Cloud ALM leverages best practices and expert guidance to ensure seamless, efficient, and successful upgrades. It also supports continuous improvement and innovation by empowering you to monitor performance, quickly identify and resolve issues, and continuously optimize your applications after upgrading.

Customers with a provisioned tenant for SAP Cloud ALM can generate and view their SAP Readiness Check results within their tenant. When you use SAP Readiness Check with SAP Cloud ALM, we offer enhanced task integration with project management through the integration app for SAP Readiness Check. This feature lets you generate new follow-ups in the form of requirements or user stories and add existing follow-ups to your SAP Readiness Check findings. You can then manage follow-ups within your SAP Cloud ALM project.

For more information on SAP Cloud ALM, please see its value proposition and the overview video below.

SAP provides a transparent release strategy with defined maintenance end dates. But we realize that in today’s challenging business environment, you simply might not be able to upgrade your system before the maintenance period ends, despite thorough planning. After the defined maintenance end dates, SAP no longer provides technological or legal updates. Your system is under so-called customer-specific maintenance, which means you must assume the responsibility for keeping the system secure and compliant. Please see SAP Note 52505 for more information about this requirement.

As a unique offering for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition customers, SAP offers the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Safekeeper service to ease the challenges of maintenance end.

This offering is intended to help you transition your system to the latest release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition when your maintenance period has ended.

There are some changes related to the maintenance end dates that need to be considered from a security perspective. SAP publishes security notes on the second Tuesday of every month, the “Security Patch Day.” These notes typically provide security corrections for issues reported by external sources. Releases going into customer-specific maintenance will be considered only in the first 12 months for notes with high priority. Please see SAP Note 3053725 - Security Corrections in Customer Specific Maintenance for details.

The safekeeper service contains a cloud application service and a sandbox system for the transition to a later release under full maintenance by SAP. The term for subscription to the service is a maximum of 27 months. During the transition time, security and legal patches are provided for your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition production system.

For more information on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Safekeeper please see SAP Note 3424346 - SAP S/4HANA Cloud Safekeeper - Description of maintenance-related service elements

Building your team’s upgrade skills

Enablement plays a crucial role in the success of your SAP S/4HANA upgrade project by ensuring that all stakeholders have the necessary resources, knowledge, and skills to effectively contribute to project outcomes.

A great tool to help your team start learning about SAP S/4HANA upgrades is the SAP Enterprise Support program. SAP Enterprise Support Academyis SAP’s comprehensive learning management system, with more than 1,400 learning assets and services across all deployment scenarios and solutions. SAP Enterprise Support value maps are designed to help you use the content in SAP Enterprise Support Academy efficiently and make the most of the SAP Enterprise Support portfolio.

Value maps are specialized learning spaces that focus on delivering SAP Enterprise Support services specifically tailored to your project requirements. They are designed to provide a targeted and personalized learning experience, catering to the unique challenges and goals of your organization. They help users navigate through the vast amount of content and the multiple resources available, ensuring that they obtain all the information relevant to the success of your project.

SAP Learning Hub details the tailored learning programs that will smooth your upgrade journey. For initial access to SAP Learning Hub, so your team can take advantage of offerings described in this chapter, follow these easy steps:

1. Complete the required one-time sign-up for SAP Learning Hub, edition for SAP Enterprise Support,
2. Access value maps
3. Go to the Upgrade section of the value map overview page to find the necessary learning program: Understand how to upgrade with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition. You’ll see the screen illustrated in Figure 11.

In addition to the official SAP S/4HANA Upgrade Guide on the SAP S/4HANA product page, your team's SAP S/4HANA experts should review the following resources for a comprehensive overview of relevant concepts for an upgrade:

• Is it time for an SAP S/4HANA Upgrade? And is it really necessary?
• SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – How and Why to Upgrade SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA 2023 or Higher

To find the latest and upcoming SAP Enterprise Support learning assets for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, including meet-the-expert sessions and e-learnings, you can visit the upgrade section of the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Support Implementation Landing Page.

For team members who want to gain hands-on experience and understand the essential steps of adapting Fiori as part of an SAP S/4HANA upgrade, SAP offers a free bootcamp to customers and partners. For more information, visit the blog 5 Steps to Fiori Bootcamp for Customers.

Leveraging services and support from SAP and its ecosystem

Services and support offerings from SAP, summarized in Figure 12, can help you with your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition upgrades, so you can smoothly transition to newer versions or enhanced functionalities.

SAP Enterprise Support provides the foundational support included with every cloud subscription, helping to ensure a comprehensive digital support experience. It includes AI-powered services, best-practice content, quality checks, and mission-critical support. And SAP Learning Journeys deliver self-paced learning content to help your team build the skills your business needs for success today and tomorrow.

Taking advantage of personalized support plans

The SAP Preferred Success plan is available as a subscription service to boost your cloud consumption and adoption in alignment with your business objectives. SAP Preferred Success runs concurrently with your SAP S/4HANA Cloud contract, providing guidance for increasing productivity, reimagining processes, accelerating innovation, lowering total cost of ownership, and mitigating risks. A subscription to the SAP Preferred Success plan for RISE with SAP offers access to a range of services specifically designed to address your upgrade needs:

• Solution planning to help you identify business process improvement opportunities in your current SAP system using SAP Signavio Process Insights or SAP Signavio Process Insights, discovery edition
• Upgrade best practices to educate your team on the why and how of a successful upgrade to a higher SAP S/4HANA release
• Continuous clean core guidance to help you reach and maintain a clean core by regularly measuring and improving data management and extensibility in your core components
• Continuous application operations guidance to provide a seamless and fully automated analysis of your current situation and to help you improve user experience, application stability, and performance
• RISE with SAP adoption services to help you understand new solutions and innovations, including SAP Business AI, the SAP Datasphere solution, SAP BTP, and new UX and sustainability solutions

The SAP Cloud Application Services offerings, both those included and those available at extra charge, help you run and manage your private cloud solutions from SAP, with a wide range of services through a subscription-based model for managing such elements as business processes and application logic, data layers, application security, software releases, performance, and integrations.

You can tailor your support experience by selecting from our fixed-price, outcome-based packages. The fixed package of SAP Cloud Application Services for release version upgrades focuses on end-to-end upgrade and update management. This includes project planning and coordination, dependency analysis and compatibility checks, as well as basic consultant support. For further details, see the service description document in SAP Trust Center.

Harnessing project-based services

With project-based services, you can choose single offerings to improve the success of initiatives you’re running today. Each project-based service focuses on delivering a specific outcome over a short, defined period. The services include such programs as the SAP Value Assurance program, a project engagement that helps safeguard solution deployment and compress timelines with a standardized, preconfigured methodology to mitigate risks from the start of your project through go-live. It includes direct support from a technical quality manager, helping ensure that your project runs smoothly and that services are delivered on time.

You can choose the level of service coverage and engagement for your upgrade project. From planning your technical upgrade to designing and implementing innovations, our service packages offer a predefined implementation structure that can be tailored to meet your desired outcomes. Examples include:

• Plan and safeguard service package to establish a foundation for your solution, helping you develop your upgrade strategy, identify dependencies, and define a new target architecture
• Business-ready service package, with additional design support activities that focus on a close-to-standard deployment of your SAP software and an update of your solution strategy, including new innovations, road map completion, and a design for solid and future-resistant architecture
• Business optimization service package, complementing the first two packages with custom code management, key to aiming for a clean core, in which we provide transparency into custom code and modifications and help you evaluate the impact of potential changes in custom code

Directly engaging with SAP experts for full transformation

With multiyear, exclusive premium engagements like the SAP MaxAttention program and the SAP ActiveAttention program, a dedicated SAP team integrates into your company, provides continuous direction for your transformation, and applies a holistic cloud approach to your whole business. SAP experts help you take on complex projects that reach across functions, processes, lines of business, and solutions while navigating the evolution of multiple cloud and hybrid landscapes. These engagements complement partner services and give you the flexibility to determine when to bring in committed resources and additional expertise.

With the long-term relationship in SAP MaxAttention, you gain an exclusive, holistic, end-to-end experience, tailored to your individual needs, your specific solution landscape, and your business goals. Join the SAP MaxAttention Community to connect with peers and gain insights from premium content that helps you to bring out your best.

The Run Best on RISE with SAP business scenario also offers well-established expert services to support your team in planning and running an SAP S/4HANA upgrade project, improving core business processes, maximizing feature usage, identifying industry innovations, and keeping your core clean. For more information, reach out to your SAP contact.

Using partner services for upgrade projects

Many SAP partners not only offer RISE with SAP implementation services, but also can help you establish a regular upgrade routine and execute upgrade projects.

To identify the right partner for your needs, the SAP Partner Finder tool is a great starting point. This tool is expressly designed to help you discover and connect with partners within the SAP ecosystem. In the partner profile section, you can view a partner’s competencies for RISE with SAP. The underlying Competency Framework simplifies the content and helps you quickly find the expertise you need – no matter your business challenges, company size, or location.

Upgrading step by step

In this section, we summarize the main tasks involved in planning and executing an upgrade to your SAP S/4HANA system. For more detailed guidance, consult the technical Upgrade Guide for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and the whitepaper Upgrading SAP S/4HANA - How, Why, and Best Practices, a guide for project managers on how to prepare and execute your upgrade and plan for post-upgrade.

Let's begin by highlighting a critical factor for a successful upgrade: the collaboration with the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team. This partnership can help ensure a smooth technical upgrade, preparing you for the introduction of new features in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. It’s essential to involve this team as early as possible to clarify the activities they must perform. The project plan should include when to request the execution of those tasks to mitigate potential impact on the project timeline. Reach out to your SAP contact for further support.

Among the tasks that SAP carries out are the operating system upgrade, the database upgrade, and the technical installation of SAP S/4HANA upgrades. The SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team requests the generation of the stack XML file from the maintenance planner to execute the SAP S/4HANA upgrade and confirm the uptime and workbench locks and downtime window. Your in-house IT experts can generate the stack XML file themselves and attach it to the service request, or the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team can create the file and seek approval before proceeding with the technical installation of the upgrade.

The SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team also defines the technical requirements for the Software Update Manager tool, initiates the upgrade according to the plan, and provides regular updates through the service request on the progress of the upgrade. After completing the upgrade activity, the team undertakes a variety of post-processing tasks. The scope of these tasks depends on specifics in your contract. Contact your technical service manager or client delivery manager for details. For further insights into the roles and responsibilities of SAP Enterprise Cloud Services teams, see the Role of the technical team in an SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition project.

In the next sections, we summarize upgrade work by the phases in the SAP Activate innovation adoption process.

The above chart outlines some of the key tasks to be completed in each phase. Let's closely analyze each phase.

Discover

The Discover phase opens SAP Activate. The most important tool to execute when planning an upgrade project is the SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades. From a business perspective, SAP Signavio Process Insights, discovery edition can also be very helpful here, for providing tailored insights into current operational business processes based on the SAP S/4HANA source system data. For each line of business, this tool includes a list of recommendations for corrections to be carried out before the project starts and a list of recommendations for innovations to be considered along with the upgrade, such as intelligent technologies, SAP Fiori apps, and other SAP cloud solutions. The outcome of this phase includes the project scope, a high-level plan, and the business case to justify the investment.

Prepare

In the Prepare phase, you need to understand and address the overall upgrade requirements and strategy. As a starting point, you should determine the maximum allowable downtime for business operations to help you choose a downtime optimization approach and define related requirements and tasks to be included in the upgrade project.

Furthermore, you should establish an upgrade strategy plan to determine upgrade cycles, possible dual maintenance needs to support the production system during the project, and any required temporary systems, such as a sandbox. Requesting the creation of a sandbox or additional temporary systems in this phase is crucial to making sure the systems are available when needed.

As part of upgrade preparation, you need to validate that the required infrastructure components, such as the SAP HANA database and operating system, fulfill the minimum technical requirements for the target SAP S/4HANA version. If updates are necessary to those components, you must plan and request SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team to execute them accordingly. We recommend setting up a project plan in SAP Cloud ALM that includes the SAP Readiness Check analysis. It will help you track the progress of required activities, such as refining relevant simplification items. The outcome of Prepare includes the completion of the technical upgrade activities, the upgrade strategy, and a detailed upgrade plan.

Explore

You should start the Explore phase by running the Maintenance Planner. This tool will check for add-on and business function incompatibilities and help determine which installation files are needed for the upgrade execution.

Another important Explore activity is running and reviewing the Simplification Item Check in detail. You need to resolve any results with red warnings before the upgrade, while yellow warnings are best resolved before but could also be resolved after the upgrade. SAP Notes help explain each simplification item.

While SAP Readiness Check showed a higher level of custom code impact, now is the time to perform a more detailed custom code analysis with the ABAP test cockpit tool. The results can be visualized in the SAP Fiori Custom Code Migration app to help you distribute the required code mitigation activities. When planning to add innovation scenarios directly with or immediately after the upgrade, it is also good practice to review your current sizing and evaluate whether the current capacity is adequate. The most critical activity in this phase is to upgrade a copy of the production system such as your sandbox. With the completion of the sandbox upgrade, you should document the first version of the SAP S/4HANA upgrade runbook.

Initial testing is also an essential part of Explore. It helps to confirm that the processes you expected would be unimpacted are indeed running as before and to test new features, such as new SAP Fiori apps. This work fosters a better understanding of the latest functionalities to prepare you for creating the scripts to be executed in the following phases. The outcome of Explore is upgrading and testing a copy of the production system.

Realize

The Realize phase begins with the upgrade of your development system. It includes additional post-upgrade activities such as activating the new SAP Fiori apps, integration, and customer code remediation. You need to implement new in-scope features, such as those that replace functionalities in compatibility scope, and execute the unit test in the development system.

Then, you need to upgrade the quality assurance system. Ideally, the Quality system should be refreshed from a recent copy of the production system. During this phase, the integration, regression, user acceptance, and other previously planned tests previously planned are carried out. We recommend using SAP Cloud ALM as a central platform for test management along with a test automation tool of your choice.

Finally, the end-user training must get underway before the end of this phase. The outcome of Realize is the upgrade of the non-production systems and preparation of the cutover plan.

Deploy

In this phase you may want to mitigate risks by holding a dress rehearsal that follows the steps in your cutover plan. This helps ensure that the final upgrade can execute as expected within the allowed business downtime.

Run

And then, it is finally time to upgrade the production system in the Run phase, complete the post-upgrade activities, and release the system to end users. After a hyper-care period, support is handed over, and the upgrade project can be closed. During Run, you must continue to monitor the system to ensure proper functioning. And this is the time to plan and implement improvements and innovations to increase the efficiency of your processes. The outcome of Deploy and Run is the upgrade and release of the production environment, as well as support for ongoing operations and implementation of the improvements and innovations previously defined.

Keeping it real through customer examples and best practices

Learning from Q_Perior / Wavestone

Q_PERIOR / Wavestone is a consulting firm specializing in business and technology solutions. They’ve completed three system upgrades since transitioning to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, with yearly upgrades in September, just before their year-end process begins. Over time, this regular approach has already helped bring down the average upgrade duration to between six and eight weeks. Q_PERIOR aims to minimize the impact on their business by shortening the upgrade duration even further. Staying on the latest release has proven beneficial for onboarding new acquisitions or country rollouts.

To ensure smooth upgrades, Q_PERIOR / Wavestone follows these best practices:

• Establishing a comprehensive project plan that they reuse for each upgrade
• Involving key stakeholders, such as business representatives and developers, early on in a kick-off meeting during the planning phase
• Incorporating lessons learned from previous upgrades into their planning process
• Carefully planning resource allocation in advance and naming individuals to be responsible for each task
• Completing a wealth of preparatory activities such as simplification checks and custom code checks through the SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades

Taking advice from SAP Expert Leslie Castle

Leslie Castle is a UX specialist in the SAP S/4HANA Regional Implementation Group who has worked with SAP customers for many years. In his blog post SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA- Customer Experiences in Optimizing Upgrades – Yes You Can Upgrade Regularly, he summarizes the following recommendations from several customers he knows who have successfully implemented regular upgrades for SAP S/4HANA:

• Upgrade regularly
  Regular upgrades have proven to be more efficient and less complex than upgrading due to maintenance needs. By upgrading every year, teams gain experience and establish efficient processes, so that upgrades approach a non-event.
• Set up an efficient and robust process
  A thorough process is crucial for smooth upgrades. One customer reported that their SAP S/4HANA upgrade production downtimes were typically 24 hours, including 2.5 hours of verification. Regular upgrades help teams become more practiced at successful upgrading.
• Minimize the upgrade delta
  Performing regular upgrades keeps the number of changes in any one upgrade far more manageable, making the process easier to handle. The longer the gap after the last upgrade, the more complex the new upgrade project becomes.
• Make upgrading a business-as-usual activity
  With properly managed regular upgrades, the process comes to be a business-as-usual activity. This mindset prepares the organization to work around any downtime more willingly and ensures a smoother transition.
• Time upgrades intelligently
  When planning annual upgrades, consider avoiding blackout periods and peak periods such as Q4, especially if you have an online sales presence. This minimizes disruptions to business operations, improving both employee experience and your bottom line.
• Separate technical and functional upgrades
  To accelerate innovation, check whether your circumstances suggest separating technical and functional upgrades. If so, complete the technical upgrade first and then focus on adopting functional innovations as mini-projects in subsequent steps.
• Automate testing
  Consider using an automated test tool to streamline the post-upgrade testing of your SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori landscape. Although there is an upfront investment for setting up and configuring the tool, automation significantly streamlines the testing process. A wide array of automated test tools are available for SAP Cloud ALM.

Summary and additional resources

Summary

These are the key benefits you can take advantage of in your upgrade journey:

Unleashing innovation:

• Increase productivity and improve business processes with advanced business AI, automation, and predictive analytics
• Enhance the user experience and collaboration with Joule, SAP Fiori, and Microsoft Teams integration
• Benefit from our continuous investment in business processes and integration technologies for seamless interaction between hybrid systems.

Fostering security and compliance:

• Stay secure with built-in cybersecurity and data protection based on the latest standards
• Improve risk and compliance transparency and help ensure adherence to local and global regulations
• Respond to the latest compliance trends from various lines of business
• Prevent IT audit issues and stay compliant with usage of compatibility packs

Build your upgrade routine:

• Optimize your upgrade strategy and harness greater flexibility and easier-to-consume innovation with SAP’s new release and maintenance strategy
• Reduce upgrade impact by following clean core principles and making upgrades a seamless part of your software lifecycle by running on the latest release and regularly adopting innovations
• SAP Activate, a methodology for implementing SAP solutions, guides you by prompting deliverables and tasks at the right time, including powerful tools and services that support your upgrade process
• Assess upgrade impact with SAP Readiness Check
• Reduce effort and improve quality with test automation
• Benefit from SAP expertise and support for technical upgrades execution included in your RISE with SAP subscription for smoother and more efficient upgrade operation
• Upskill your team with Enterprise Support Academy and dedicated SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition Value Maps.
• Streamline the process by leveraging services and support from SAP and its ecosystem

Additional resources

SAP Community for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition upgrades

What's new viewer for SAP S/4HANA

Innovations for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition

2023 S/4HANA Cloud release highlights blog

2022 S/4HANA Cloud release highlights blog

RISE with ERP | clean core strategy

Upgrade guide for SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition (technical)

You can always talk to your SAP representative for additional background.