In today’s fast-changing business environment, enterprises must act at speed to tackle disruption, capture opportunities and develop and deliver innovative products and services. They’re under pressure to be faster, smarter, more agile and connected: to become an intelligent enterprise.

How can intelligent enterprises meet these new demands? By using a powerful platform like SAP S/4HANA that’s been designed with their needs in mind. Offerings such as RISE with SAP help to simplify and accelerate the move to cloud and will support continuous innovation throughout the journey to become an intelligent enterprise.

While organizations will move to SAP S/4HANA sooner or later, there’s much to be gained by starting the journey now. Those that do will be able to take advantage of applications designed for the digital age, and benefit from new functionality as it becomes available.

Starting early doesn’t have to mean taking the full leap and migrating the entire SAP environment to SAP S/4HANA in one go. Other options are available. After all, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for moving to SAP S/4HANA. Accenture’s approach recognizes that each organization has its own requirements and its own priorities. We help clients define the best course of action for their specific business.

Up to now businesses have had to choose between either brownfield or greenfield conversions. Brownfield doesn’t let organizations choose what to upgrade or migrate, or when to do it. It carries over the full current system – including old business processes, customizations or unused components that should be retired.

Greenfield takes the opposite approach. It starts from scratch with a brand-new implementation, complete with new business processes and configurations. The catch? Organizations can’t carry over configurations or historical data if, as is often the case, business processes need to be redesigned, including data required for compliance purposes.

Both greenfield and brownfield are “all or nothing” approaches. They limit what to migrate and what to upgrade. Now there’s another way.

Companies can benefit from our Smart()field approach to SAP S/4HANA conversion. This keeps all options open, giving clients the best of greenfield and brownfield approaches. It enables clients to choose which data and configurations they carry over.

This gives them a golden opportunity to reassess the data, business processes and customizations they’ve been accumulating for years, and decide which to bring forward and which to retire. This means organizations are free to innovate, while preserving investments and improving what needs to be improved.

Our Smart()field approach starts by looking at the client’s current and future business strategy. Remember, most SAP ECC applications were implemented 10-15 years ago. A lot has changed since then. We help clients understand their current business needs, and how their industry and business is likely to evolve in the future.

Our Smart()field approach enables companies to easily migrate the processes that aren’t likely to change much, and transform business processes that are likely to undergo radical shifts in the future.

Our Smart()field approach focuses on delivering both business and IT value from a SAP S/4HANA conversion. The business stands to accelerate time-to-market for new products and services, unlock process efficiencies, and foster innovation.

Meanwhile, we help CIOs keep their systems stable during the transition, define the right architecture for their infrastructure and applications, minimize delivery time and deliver cost savings.

To help clients achieve these benefits for both IT and the business, our approach focuses on three dimensions: