Thousands of organizations are making the shift from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA. For most, that means choosing between keeping custom code and existing processes or taking the opportunity to reengineer the business, with a full move to SAP standard processes.  

Achieving that means extensively reviewing existing code, mapping infrastructure, and understanding the impact of S/4HANA on your current business processes.  That’s where our technology partner, Panaya, plays a role in Cognitus’ Gallop Conversion Package.  

Panaya is a world leader in change intelligence, with a patented suite of tools for change impact analysis, environment assessment, code review, and automated code remediation.  With best-in-class tooling and more risk identifiers than any other competitor, as well as a team of experts behind the tooling, Cognitus is proud to have Panaya as our technology partner.  

Delivering change intelligence  

Panaya partners with Cognitus to deliver some of the tooling in our Gallop Discovery package. This includes the tooling behind our initial system assessment and automated code remediation. Those solutions support Cognitus in delivering a faster and more data-based conversion process – first by identifying and prioritizing risks associated with the transformation, and then implementing code correction to reduce the impact of identified risks.  

“We work with best of breed tooling from world leaders like Panaya, because they allow us to enhance our conversions using industry-tested solutions and adding to our own expertise with that of other teams.” – Dennis Onstenk, Director of Business Development, Cognitus  

Panaya S/4Assess is an end-to-end S/4HANA system conversion assessment package delivered as part of the Cognitus Gallop Package. This includes a full scoping of your existing systems, with recommendations, optimized activities for corrections and testing, and effort and savings estimations towards your system conversion path. In addition, all activities are organized by complexity and priority, with real-world usage and likelihood of breakage taken into account.  

This standard and custom code impact analysis answers questions about what needs to change, what you have to reengineer or replace, what will break, what’s deprecated, and what you have to test further in just 48 hours. Further, you get this effort estimation without SI or in-house expertise.  

In addition, with dozens of correction categories, 70+ correction types, and correction activities, cloned programs, and impact on test catalogs, Panaya is the most comprehensive solution of its type.  

Making data-driven decisions  

Cognitus uses this assessment as part of our Gallop Discovery Pilot and Implementation. Here, teams use Panaya’s data to enhance the business case, project plan, and project roadmaps built as part of the package. This allows Cognitus to use task and test priority to optimize project scopes, focus on the right corrections, and make data-based decisions for your roadmap and the eventual transformation.  

“An analysis will tell you what’s deprecated, what isn’t supported, and where your risks are – so we can build the correction tests and unit tests to ensure risks are mapped, understood, and accounted for. Panaya integrates that with human assessment to correlate data to usage and, of course, we aggregate it with ABAP Test Cockpit, ATC Results, SAP Code Inspector Results, etc.” – Dennis 

It also comes into play during resourcing, where Cognitus teams use Panaya’s data as part of project costing and resourcing, to better estimate time, effort, and skillsets required. 

Reductions in timelines and costs 

With Panaya’s system assessments and code analysis tooling to inform assessments, Cognitus is able to deliver faster and better system and business transformations.  

“Even if you’re going for Brownfield, SAP’s conversion tool still needs multiple iterations to between sandbox and ECC before everything works. Panaya reduces those iterations by an average of 50% by highlighting risks early, downscoping non-relevant risks, and greatly saving time and total costs”  

“We implement downscoping and accelerators based on usage and true likelihood of failure, enabling you to accelerate by a minimum of 50%. We further accelerate that with auto code correction, which can significantly reduce timelines across projects.”  

If you identify risks before starting or during unit testing, you can significantly reduce the cost of remediating them. For example, if you know in advance that X type of impacted component types are not a concern, you can auto downscope them, with significant impacts on cost and budgets. 

Of course, assessments aren’t just valuable before the CTO/CIO has made a decision on transformation approach – there will always be redesigns, you’ll always be forced into ARIBA, FIORI, BTP, etc. With the right intelligence, you might have the data to make better choices regarding what to redesign and what to use as standard in SAP.  

A bright future with Panaya  

Panaya is a leader in SAP S/4HANA change intelligence solutions. But, they’re not stopping there. The company, which already has more capabilities than any other solution on the market is busy with a roadmap around increasing auto correction capabilities, identifying gaps in manual and automated tests, business-driven change assessments, and more. Automated testing will also allow us to quickly remove gaps in tests, automating testing where it fills gaps, and highlighting risk areas that need further testing. 

“Of course, we’re also constantly working to optimize testing scope and testing time while identifying gaps in our toolset.  

Panaya is an official Cognitus technology partner and we’re proud to offer Panaya technology as part of our Gallop package.

To learn more, visit Panaya.com