The business technologies you utilize daily have a major impact on your business. This is because the technological tools that handle certain business operations can empower your employees to be more productive and enable new ways of working, or they can slow down your workflow. Nowadays, many companies—small businesses or large enterprises—look to SAP’s business intelligence software tools and solutions to run. Since the SAP suite of products handles everything from ERP and finance to CRM, digital supply chain management, HR tasks, and analytics, there’s a variety of ways you may rely on SAP to help your business function in the 21st century.
Like many companies, the SAP makers are always looking to improve their software’s user experience, functionality, and features, and SAP HANA has recently been released to this very end. With the SAP announcement, HANA has also requested that by 2027, your business will need to switch from its current iteration to HANA. When handling a migration process crucial to your business, you need to take your migration seriously. Read on for some tips for managing your SAP 4HANA migration, including a quick overview of the two different types of approaches you may want to count on when migrating your applications and data from one system to another.
What do you need to know about the Greenfield Approach?
The dichotomy of Greenfield versus Brownfield exists in a few different industries beyond application and data management. That being said, it’s understandable if you’ve never heard of the Brownfield or Greenfield Approach before considering data management and migration. At its heart, the Greenfield Approach applies primarily to projects requiring work from the ground up to get up and run. When migrating using the Greenfield Approach, you’ll create a new instance of everything from scratch, giving you some benefits by offering a fresh start.
What do you need to know about the Brownfield Approach?
If losing data when starting new application instances from scratch terrifies you, the Brownfield Approach may make more sense for your constitution and your business. A Brownfield project requires you to make changes to a previously established infrastructure. Depending on your applications, it may make sense to use the Brownfield Approach as you work to migrate data and user settings from one application to the updated version of SAP HANA. That being said, if there’s a completely new application in HANA that you’re excited to tap for a specific project or use, you might need to take the Greenfield Approach to execute that application since you wouldn’t necessarily have any historical data associated with it.
