On November 21, 2022, the Steel Division's productive SAP ERP systems were successfully converted to the current product version SAP S/4HANA. The road to this point was certainly not an easy one: 16,000 user-defined code objects, 90 developers and 500 test cases. Nevertheless, the team from voestalpine group-IT and the Steel Division's specialist departments mastered this considerable challenge with flying colors.
Maintenance and support for SAP ERP systems will not be discontinued by the manufacturer until 2027. Nevertheless, the final conversion to S/4HANA already took place in November 2022. Why so early? Because it gives the voestalpine Group a head start. Current and future projects benefit from the modern technology. Innovative functionalities developed exclusively for S/4HANA can now be used directly.
The conversion to S/4HANA is not an upgrade.
This is emphasized by the project manager from voestalpine group-IT. In addition to the purely technical conversion (the upgrade part), the switch to a new product required countless adjustments to both the existing SAP landscapes and the new system.
In the preparation work, all relevant adjustments were identified in order to create an overview. For example, the previously 18-digit material numbers were extended to 40 digits. This sounds simple, but it entails changes right down to the details of the system. In addition, the Steel Division's business processes were to remain as unaffected as possible. In over 600 project tasks, these adjustments were analyzed, implemented, tested and documented by a 90-strong project team.
The actual conversion was the heart of the project and took place in six conversion cycles with over 200 work steps each. The project team carried out the conversion virtually on its own, with the support of external experts and partial assistance from the manufacturer.
After the successful completion of the final test phase with over 300 participants, the existing systems were finally migrated to SAP S/4HANA over a weekend at the end of November.
The project manager on the part of voestalpine group-IT reports with satisfaction:
The number of (technical) difficulties that reached us via tickets was back to normal just a few weeks after the changeover.
Our joint project with the voestalpine Steel Division was awarded as a winner of the SAP Quality Award 2023. We are very proud of the work of our colleagues!
