The Driving Forces Behind SAP Migration
Is your treasury team facing an SAP migration? You’re not alone. With the 2027 deadline for SAP Business Suite 7/ECC core applications mainstream maintenance approaching, organizations worldwide are making the leap to S/4HANA. In fact, recent research shows only one in ten organizations still have no migration plans in place.
Whether triggered by M&A activity, strategic IT decisions, or the inevitable shift to S/4HANA, SAP migrations are reshaping enterprise technology landscapes. The cloud trend is unmistakable, with more companies abandoning on-premise solutions for the flexibility and scalability of cloud-based alternatives.
Treasury’s Migration Headache
While IT departments lead these migrations, treasury teams face unique challenges. How do you maintain your payment operations while adhering to IT-driven project deadlines? What happens to those carefully constructed payment connections between your SAP system and banking partners?
The risk to established payment processes is real, especially if you’ve built custom connectivity between SAP and your banks. Ensuring continuity in payments and statement processing isn’t just desirable—it’s business-critical.
Your Treasury Stands at a Crossroads
As your organization plans its SAP migration, treasury faces a pivotal choice:
Option 1: Lift and Shift
Continue managing SAP-to-bank and other systems connectivity in-house, tasking your IT team with recreating and fixing these connections during and after migration.
Option 2: Digital Transformation
Use this migration as a catalyst to reassess your treasury technology stack and implement solutions that future-proof your operations.
Why “Lift and Shift” Falls Short
SAP is brilliant at enterprise resource planning—that’s why it’s a global leader. However, companies with complex payments infrastructures often additionally rely on external consultants and extensive in-house format development for full international payment processing or global bank connectivity. This is particularly relevant in the context of SAP migrations.
As your team and IT manually run banking relationships and navigate the complexity of regional payment formats, this means – in case of a migration or regulatory requirement changes – there will certainly be a need for rebuilding these custom connections to dozens of banks worldwide. You’ll continue to face the same challenges with each migration, format change (e.g. ISO 20022) or when integrating new systems after an acquisition. Repeated projects, constant IT dependency, process disruptions, and slower business operations should not be the objective.
A Smarter Approach to SAP Migration: Dare to digitalize
Instead of merely surviving your SAP migration, why not use it as an opportunity to transform treasury operations? By implementing a specialized payments hub between SAP, your other systems, and your banks, you can:
- Streamline connectivity across multiple systems and channels
- Ensure continuity during migration
- Reduce dependency on IT resources
- Rely on centralized payment format management
- Future-proof against format changes like ISO 20022
This approach transforms complex many-to-many connections into a simplified one-to-many model through a centralized system. The result? A treasury function that’s not just migration-ready but positioned for greater agility and efficiency in whatever comes next.
As Cilja Schwan, Treasury Manager at Bahlsen, noted after their SAP migration: “Thanks to the TIS SAP Add-on, switching from R3 to S/4HANA did neither impose significant challenges on our TIS setup nor did it require heavy IT involvement. The new connectivity via the TIS Add-on could simply be established by setting a few configurations. Our current processes run equally speedy and smooth”.
Choosing the Right Partner to Elevate Your Treasury Function in Your SAP Journey
When selecting a payments hub, it’s crucial to choose a vendor with deep SAP integration capabilities and an SAP certification to ensure optimal results. This certification isn’t just a badge—it represents validated expertise in connecting with SAP environments and maintaining those connections through upgrades and changes.
A specialized payments hub positioned between your SAP systems—regardless of version ECC, S/4HANA, on-premise, or cloud—and your banks and other systems enables you to smoothly navigate the complexity that comes with establishing and maintaining connectivity across your global digital treasury landscape. The result is a treasury function that is more agile. Payment capabilities and smooth operations can be maintained even during planned or unplanned SAP system upgrades or migrations, new entities with different legacy systems and new banks can be onboarded more smoothly.
Delivering Payment Expertise
TIS has years of experience working together with SAP, supporting enterprises as they navigate the challenge of upgrading their financial operations for future business resilience. So, while your SAP system provides the enterprise foundation, TIS can deliver the payment expertise.
Together, SAP and TIS are an ideal combination for treasury that maximizes your SAP investment while ensuring payment excellence. Because of TIS’ deep integration with SAP and its capability to seamlessly connect to your other ERPs, TMS, HR, back-office systems, and banks, you can be confident that your payment operations run smoothly at all times, especially when you are changing or migrating ERP systems, but also during periods of business growth.
Fully SAP Certified for All Environments
Certified for all SAP environments, TIS has every scenario covered, enabling your treasury to smoothly navigate updates and changes in SAP.
TIS’ deep SAP integration and expertise in financial format management offer you:
- A complete payment ecosystem for all SAP environments
- Access to more than 125,000 payment profiles
- Bank connections through preferred channels including EBICs, H2H, Swift, and APIs across global banking networks
- Pre-built connectors and integration templates
- A 100% no-code implementation that is easy to deploy
- Increased visibility into payment processes & easier resolution management
Integrating your SAP system with TIS can reduce the cost, risk, time, and effort required to elevate your treasury alongside system updates and migrations. This means your organization can evolve without ever compromising payment continuity.
Therefore, as you plan your SAP migration strategy, consider not just how to maintain your current treasury capabilities, but how to enhance them. The right approach won’t just get you through the migration—it will position your treasury for whatever comes next in our rapidly evolving financial landscape.
Take advantage of pre-built, tested, and deployed solutions.
Conclusion: Continuity, adaptability, and scalability
SAP migration represents more than a technical upgrade—it’s a strategic inflection point for business operations. For treasury, this means that, while the path of least resistance might seem to be recreating your existing connectivity setup, forward-thinking treasury teams are using the SAP migration as a catalyst for meaningful transformation.
By implementing a specialized payments hub with certified SAP integration capabilities, you can turn a potentially disruptive migration into an opportunity for greater efficiency, control, and agility. The benefits extend far beyond the migration itself. You’ll gain a treasury function that can adapt quickly to format changes, seamlessly incorporate new entities after M&A activity, and maintain payment operations even during system upgrades or migrations.
Your SAP migration isn’t just inevitable—it’s an opportunity. Will you simply migrate, or will you transform?
TIS delivers the payment and connectivity expertise you need to approach any SAP system migration with confidence. Reach out to learn more.
