At a glance
Industry
Life sciences
Location
Global
Challenges
Tight timeline with risk of significant costs from delays and requirement variations from typical conversion practices
Success Highlights
- 100% synchronization of almost two million records
- Retained customer numbering across data transformation
- Three-month project delivery
Our approach
As the SAP S/4HANA migration is a multivendor project, our client initially reached out to its SAP partner for this premigration activity, but Cognizant stepped in when our client’s partner was unable to position the right resources within the tight timeline. We have delivered customer/vendor integration projects since 2022 for several global organizations. Going in, we understood that achieving 100% synchronization was mandatory for project success. With this data evolution, any updates to customer and vendor data are immediately transferred to the relevant business partner.
Our client was embarking on the process of upgrading from SAP ERP 6.0 with enhancement package 6. Our team started with the established best practices for S/4HANA migrations, including:
- Conducting prechecks and check reports
- Running master data cleansing and consistency checks
- Running a CVI customization check
- Establishing CVI and business partner customization
Additional typical steps in these migrations include archiving customer and vendor data with deletion flags and activating a suppression check to bypass data errors such as postal and tax jurisdiction codes. However, our client did not opt for the suppression check to bypass data errors, instead opting for those data errors to be fixed to move forward with the migration.
The Cognizant team created multiple iterations in lower environments, including development, quality assurance and verification, which helped to establish the processes and eliminate all the data issues in production. Initially, one full end-to-end conversion was executed in a sandbox environment. The team analyzed and corrected the data, then repeated the sequences in the other environments.
In the first run, Cognizant was able to deliver a 99.999% success rate. We experienced an unsync rate of less than 0.001% out of over 1.9 million records. These errors were due to invalid tax number (VAT) data and quickly resolved.
Business outcomes
A critical initial stage of the brownfield S/4HANA migration, our client’s CVI project was completed with zero down time, resulting in no impact to business operations. Our client was able to keep its original customer numbering after the migration—a key requirement for the project. Now it has achieved simpler, faster updates in customer-vendor master data that flow in real time to the relevant business partners.
Cognizant (Nasdaq-100: CTSH) engineers modern businesses. We help our clients modernize technology, reimagine processes and transform experiences so they can stay ahead in our fast-changing world. Together, we’re improving everyday life. See how at www.cognizant.com or @cognizant.
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