But that generally isn’t a big deal or a major detractor. It takes some thinking ahead to maintain access to this data and to ensure legal compliance.
Your company will also “lose” its historical data.Take invoicing, for example: you have to recreate your perfectly nice invoice layouts from the beginning. This makes sense because you have to redesign the processes that were working well with the old system. The initial cost of a greenfield SAP S/4HANA implementation will be higher than other approaches.However, you’ll need temporary solutions for intercompany movements and possibly parallel systems running at the same time. In the case of a company with multiple sites, a greenfield implementation can be approached in a phased way. A company might have shifted from providing goods to offering services, or your geographical footprint has been restructured. Businesses are never static – chances are that your business organization has changed over time and you used to rely on processes that aren’t valid anymore. There’s also a business reason why a greenfield approach is often favored.With greenfield, you can just sweep aside this unsortable, non-upgradable mess and start all over again. In some companies, the legacy systems have been set up in such a way that they are hard to manage, with lots of custom coding, ad hoc solutions and different configurations. Without a doubt, a greenfield implementation is the easiest way to get started with SAP S/4HANA.It’s a green field, untouched by previous developments. In the case of SAP S/4HANA implementations, a ‘greenfield’ implementation means starting from scratch with a completely new system without taking anything from the past with you.