The Vortex Consulting Team is excited to be on-site at SAP for Utilities 2025, the premier North American gathering for utility ERP professionals, taking place September 8–10 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. We’ll be engaging with cutting-edge sessions on SAP-driven transformation—from Cloud strategies and asset management to AI-powered analytics—helping SAP clients turn complexity into competitive advantage. To learn more about the conference click here – see you there!
Vortex Consulting has been chosen by a leading aerospace and defense manufacturer to provide SAP GTS consulting support as part of full lifecycle implementations for their A&D and Industrial Groups. The consultant will lead and participate in requirements gathering, design, configuration, testing, training, and go-live support, with a focus on customs management, compliance, and risk management. Additional responsibilities include developing functional specifications, maintaining technical documentation, supporting workshops, troubleshooting issues, and providing end-user training. This engagement ensures the client’s SAP GTS system is optimized for regulatory compliance, trade management, and operational efficiency across multiple business units.
Vortex Consulting has been selected by a leading food and beverage company to provide onsite SAP S/4 EWM support. Two Vortex consultants will assist with the Go-Live of the Extended Warehouse Management system. The engagement includes monitoring system performance, addressing issues in real time, and ensuring a smooth transition during the critical launch period. This support helps the client achieve operational readiness and maximize efficiency from day one.
Motivations for SAP upgrades range from cost, compliance, and revenue growth to financial performance, among others. However, nearly all these drivers face hidden barriers. In discussions with customers about data quality and archiving, two recurring themes often emerge and are highly relevant to SAP S/4HANA transformations:
• Misaligned data retention and destruction practices • Limited exposure to enterprise-wide information governance principles within the business
Defining your Ground Zero, where your foundation is solid and where it needs reinforcement, begins with one simple, strategic question:
“How do we handle data retention and destruction?”
The answer to this question reveals more than just policy gaps; it shows how much control you have over cost, timeline, agility, and ultimately, transformation success.
Information Governance is Ground Zero, before Phase Zero even starts.
It’s where you start:
Controlling project scope and cost.
Reducing long-term IT operating costs.
Enabling agility to shift with markets and tech.
Creating a foundation for trustworthy, transparent data.
From Patchwork to Purpose
My first encounter with SAP archiving was 25 years ago. Imagine this: 18 months into a multi-plant rollout, it stalls at “Live” sites due to data volume issues in revenue-critical processes. We fixed it with archiving, but it was a patchwork solution.
Even today, archiving is still often viewed as a technical cleanup, disconnected from broader governance and transformation strategies. That perspective limits its value. The great news in the Ground Zero perspective is that you have a clean slate to innovate governance that can scale with your company’s ever-evolving requirements.
A future post will cover the essentials of Phase Zero. For now, let’s stay focused on the bigger picture.
Why ILG? Why Now?
Information Lifecycle Governance (ILG) is the management of data from creation to destruction. Wrapped around that lifecycle are the Three P’s:
Policy – Is it modern, enforceable, and relevant?
People – What is the RACI for ILG?
Processes – Are they scalable, cost-effective, and structured to service your business?
Many organizations still depend on data retention policies designed for paper records or legacy systems. That’s like trying to increase revenue with a CRM that holds both current and obsolete contacts and preferences—it slows down progress, obscures insights, and risks eroding trust. Why would out-of-date policies still meet today’s goals for growth, compliance, or customer experience?
A VP and a CFO from two separate companies recently discussed similar objectives for their ILG efforts.
Accountability for governance
Ownership roles that drive clarity
Best practices that minimize silos and promote transparency
Reducing data footprints ahead of upgrades or cloud migrations
Sound familiar?
Before You Plan Your SAP S/4HANA Transformation
What could your transformation look like with early visibility into quiet barriers—and a clear path to address them before Phase Zero begins?
Positioning Information Lifecycle Governance (ILG) as Ground Zero sets a foundation for buildable value. It identifies the same decisions, innovations, and ownership models that your S/4 transformation will rely on.
By addressing these barriers early, Phase Zero gains meaningful traction, with a clean core strategy, stronger accountability, and alignment across the business.
Let’s start the conversation…
That’s how transformation builds lasting momentum. And that’s where we bring focus, structure, and value.If you’re ready to explore where your ILG stands today, we’re here to help. Learn more about Vortex Consulting’s SAP Data Volume and Archiving services, or contact us to get started today!
The move to SAP S/4HANA is more than just an upgrade project—it’s a strategic transformation that touches every part of your business. But how do you know if your organization is truly ready or where to start? That’s where Vortex Consulting’s SAP S/4HANA Readiness Workshop comes in.
Join us on Tuesday, August 14, where we are inviting SAP IT and business leaders to attend a live, expert-led session presented by Vortex’s Sven Wierzbicki, Senior Vice President, SAP Solution Architecture a veteran SAP strategist with over 20 years of experience guiding global enterprises through complex ERP transformations.
SAP S/4HANA initiatives fail when organizations underestimate the complexity of early-stage planning. Our workshop helps eliminate that risk. Based on Vortex’s proven OnRamp Methodology, our interactive session will guide you through the critical steps to ensure your migration starts strong and stays on track.
You’ll gain practical answers to questions like:
Are we ready for a transformation to SAP S/4HANA?
Which deployment approach makes the most sense—Brownfield, Greenfield, or Hybrid?
What internal and external resources will we need?
How can we reduce project risk before implementation even begins?
What to expect during the workshop:
Gain a clear understanding of the benefits for SAP S/4HANA
Identify the key business drivers for SAP S/4HANA
Insights into the business and functional impacts of S/4HANA
A high-level transition strategy – to set roadmap and timeline expectations
Guidance on tools, timelines, migration approaches and project teams
Learn how to assess your system landscape and business readiness for the transformation
Understanding the importance of how to plan for success with an OnRamp assessment
If your organization relies on SAP and is considering or preparing for the upgrade to SAP S/4HANA, this workshop is for you.
Whether you’re in the early stages of exploring the transition or already mapping out your upgrade path, this session will equip you with the insights, tools, and strategic guidance needed to navigate the complexities of SAP S/4HANA adoption.
CIOs and IT Leaders
SAP Project Managers
Business Process Owners
Transformation Leads
Meet your presenter:
Sven Wierzbicki, Senior Vice President of SAP Solution Architecture
Sven is a seasoned senior IT executive and strategic advisor. He boasts a demonstrated history of successfully implementing technology and business process service capabilities on an enterprise scale for international corporations. With expertise gained over 3 decades in corporate business, consulting, and entrepreneurship, he has played a pivotal role in guiding various companies through transformative initiatives.
As senior vice president of SAP solution architecture at Vortex, Sven taps into the knowledge gained from those thirty years worth of experience in SAP and the larger digital transformation landscape. From conceptualizing enterprise visions to executing intricate global projects, Sven consistently delivers results. His extensive experience encompasses areas such as SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA strategy and delivery, global IT strategy, program and portfolio management, and budgeting, as well as contract and supplier management.
SAP Architect Matthew Montano continues his series on the Vortex Consulting blog:
I have a distant yet distinct memory from a client in the U.S. Midwest (with a popular restaurant billboard that quipped “where butter is king”). In it, a heavy duty trolley was pushed around the office every morning, delivering dozens of reports, each with hundreds of pages.
The company was in the middle of migrating to an online reporting tool that was outside of SAP ECC where each user could create their own custom report and–in theory–require absolutely zero IT support. I thought it was a noble and realistic goal.
But it never happened.
While the printed report and the trolley went away, the SAP custom report that IT had to support didn’t.
Here’s a bar bet that any SAP consultant would make: all SAP implementations end up with a custom report that has become embedded in how business is done.
The genesis of the report was likely to join together information which wasn’t otherwise connected by SAP. Chances are, the since-updated platform no longer provided an obvious out-of-the-box transaction to meet the requirement, prompting cries of “that was the way we used to do it in the legacy system!”
Someone wanted just one extra field… then someone wanted it to be emailed automatically… then someone described extending the existing report off in a different direction because the SAP custom report was in a comfort zone.
The report likely ends up being a performance hog with business logic and assumptions deeply embedded in code. The report likely becomes so intertwined with how business is done that additional changes are technically cumbersome, change management is significant, and the report never gets any faster to run.
And so the SAP custom report becomes the Zombie Report. It won’t die, it won’t go away, and change is expensive. Every year it creates a technical deficit that contributes to an accumulating technical debt.
So, what can you do?
Standard SAP is Standard SAP
SAP has provided an incredible amount of reports out of the box, with many of them having been added in recent years. Using them is “free” compared to building and sustaining your own.
If you believe standard SAP doesn’t meet your requirements, a good first question is, “Why?” Are you trying to use SAP in a manner disjointed to how it was designed? If you truly believe your organization’s needs are special, you are likely going to be already bumping against using SAP in a non-standard manner. Creating a custom report might be symptomatic of a deeper problem of using SAP in a non-standard manner and could be a catalyst to revisit why you aren’t using SAP as it was intended.
External Reporting Tools
Well beyond the scope of a crabby consultant blog post, there are many tools that place control of the data they report in the hands of the user. While there will be some setup work to ensure that data is interpreted and reported correctly, they can enable you to avoid the hardwiring in SAP ABAP code assumptions and the creation of a single monolithic, inflexible custom Zombie Report.
But why is there really an SAP Custom Report?
An essential question is this: Why is there a report in the first place? The entire concept of a report was born when computers were expensive, both for CPU performance and the cost (at the time) of an interface, such as a screen and keyboard. The solution was to use lower cost computing cycles–often in the middle of the night–and relatively cheaper paper for a printed report that was delivered via a trolley to your desk the next morning.
But any nightly printed report, or even one pulled from SAP through a Zombie Report, becomes inaccurate the second after the report is run.
The harder, but far more valuable activity is to revisit how the Zombie Report is being used, then go beyond just finding a standard or external report, but rather reengineering the process away from the report mentality. Instead of someone running the Zombie Report, visually looking for conditions that might trigger an action or workflow, you may even be able to turn to a decades-old SAP capability that can systematically find those conditions and trigger an alert. SAP’s Fiori tiles are geared towards an automobile dashboard philosophy where they provide a visual indication of a condition. I’m betting your team will find the convenience of this newer alert system light years ahead of the alternative–dealing with a clunky and challenging Zombie Report.
If your company is trapped by the technical debt of an SAP custom report and wishes to explore more efficient options, I invite you to reach out to the team at Vortex Consulting to help you get things straightened out. Call us at 1.888.627.3640 today.
About the Author: Matthew Montano is a Vortex Consulting SAP architect with more than 25 years of experience in Electronic Data Interchange, Supply Chain Integration, and Third-Party Logistics. His passion for good documentation and streamlined work process has yielded measurable results for clients in the consumer packaged goods, life sciences, manufacturing, and transportation industries across both the United States and Canada.
Be in the driver’s seat on your SAP S/4HANA journey—with clarity, confidence, and control.
Navigating an upcoming transformation to SAP S/4HANA? The path can be full of critical decisions that can affect scope, risk, budgets, change management—and any missteps can be costly and impact your project timeline. That’s why Vortex Consulting created SAP S/4HANA OnRamp Methodology: an accelerator to help SAP organizations evaluate readiness, spot opportunity, and build a fact-based roadmap– in record time while following industry best practices.
What makes Vortex Consulting’s OnRamp Methodology stand out?
Opportunity Outlook – Identifying opportunities to leverage additional SAP capabilities
Nuanced Navigation – Engage in early planning to establish a solid project roadmap that is achievable on-time and on-budget
Risk Reduction – Proactively tackling risks before the project starts will prevent rework or derailment in later phases
Alignment Assessment – Assessing alignment between current processes, SAP best practices, and team readiness (OCM)
Momentum Mapping – Mapping how to build and sustain momentum by pulling later-phased deliverables forward to declutter the Explore phase
Pathway Preparation – Identify and plan inflection points on the project roadmap to anticipate necessary decisions
What you’ll receive in your OnRamp rapid assessment
When it comes to SAP transformation, getting started with the right strategy is everything. That’s why organizations turn to Vortex’s senior SAP experts for a clear, confident roadmap forward. Leveraging decades of hands-on experience, our team conducts a comprehensive ERP Landscape Analysis to assess your current environment, followed by tailored migration path recommendations—whether Brownfield, Greenfield, or Hybrid—to align with your business needs. We go beyond surface-level guidance to deliver actionable insights that form the strategic foundation for a value-driven, low-risk transformation. The result: a clear timeline, a detailed project plan, and a realistic budget—all aligned to your goals and ready to execute.
Vortex’s senior SAP experts deliver:
ERP Landscape Analysis – Lay of the land review of your current setup
Migration Path Recommendations – Brownfield, Greenfield, or Hybrid: we advise what suits your business
Actionable Insights – A strategic foundation for value-driven, smooth transformation
Deliverables: A clear timeline, a project plan, and a realistic budget aligned to your goals
Why Clients Choose Vortex’s OnRamp Methodology?
SAP clients choose Vortex Consulting’s OnRamp Methodology because it provides a proven, disciplined approach that sets projects up for success from day one. At its core, OnRamp emphasizes scope clarity, which eliminates blind spots and ensures all stakeholders share a common understanding of objectives, deliverables, and boundaries—critical to avoiding misalignment and rework down the line. The methodology also prioritizes surprise avoidance, identifying potential risks and challenges early so they can be addressed proactively. This not only minimizes costly delays but also optimizes resource allocation, saving both time and money. What truly sets OnRamp apart, however, is the senior-level SAP expertise behind it. Vortex’s experienced consultants don’t just advise—they drive execution, translating strategic plans into tangible results with speed and precision. For clients seeking a smoother, smarter path to SAP success, OnRamp delivers both confidence and control.
The date has been set for the ASUG Wisconsin Chapter fall meeting! Note that this meeting is open to non-members, so if you’ve been interested in learning more about ASUG WI, this is the perfect chance to attend and get to know some of the community. Join our local Vortex team members for a great event – visit the ASUG event listing for more details.
SAP Architect Matthew Montano continues his series on the Vortex Consulting blog:
Back in the late 1990s–decades before S/4HANA made its way onto the scene–my first full SAP implementation took a team of a couple dozen SAP consultants about 9 months. In addition to focusing on the successful incorporation of multiple currencies and languages, my secondary responsibility was the full EDI integration of 30+ EDI transactions across about a half dozen EDI trading partners. With just a part-time technical resource and a Windows NT EDI Server–which has less computing power than the phone in your pocket–we did it all on time and on budget.
So what’s changed since then? Today, the topic of EDI integration as part of their S/4HANA project can strike fear in even the most hardened of CIOs. Fear of exploding budgets, fear of racks of expensive servers and software licenses with fancy names, and the fear of endless consulting bills.
All because we need to exchange several hundred bytes of correctly crafted letters and numbers that represent a Purchase Order or an Invoice?
How did the everyday work of EDI integration become intimidating?
I have some theories and some recommendations on how to think about EDI as part of your next project to keep you from running away scared.
A key question is, “What is EDI?” Although formally known as Electronic Data Interchange, it is better described as Electronic Document Interchange. In its most accepted definition, it is the electronic exchange of relatively standard messages that mirror a paper document such as a Purchase Order, Order Confirmation, or Invoice. Not only is the content of the message often a mirror image to a paper equivalent, but so is the timing and frequency. Most companies use EDI standards from the early 1990s and only exchange them every 10-15 minutes. This is all fine.
There is a separate integration world where none of these norms apply. For example, integrating SAP with an internal Warehouse Management System (WMS) is very different. Sometimes the connections might be synchronous (in which both systems exchange data and there is a confirmation almost instantly). Sometimes there are multiple WMS systems that require significant transformation of the messages.
Solutions such as SAP Integration Suite (as part of SAP BTP), or third-party suites such as Boomi or Mulesoft, are built for non-EDI integration scenarios. In other words, they are made for scenarios like those I’ve just outlined.
But dragging EDI into the same integration world could unnecessarily kill your budget and be intimidating to all involved. Consider these red flags:
If you hear the term “canonical,” be wary. The concept prescribes that messages from different sources are all mapped into a single internal common structure and then mapped on to their destination structure. This might sound like a great way to simplify building and testing. But the EDI standards themselves already represent a canonical standard, one that is already a middle-aged global standard that is proven to accommodate nearly every business scenario. Additionally, when using SAP, you are almost assuredly going to use an IDoc, which is by definition a “canonical” itself.
“Canonical” approaches frequently fail because of the telephone-game problem: too many transformations.
If you hear the phrase “IDocs are dead; APIs are the future,” you might want to hang up the phone. API (Application Programming Interfaces) is the collective term usually used to describe a live connection between two systems. Terms such as RESTful, SOAP, and OData correspond to the various protocols. Need a real-time check of inventory or calculation of a price? Then an API-based integration is the approach to take. But EDI messages are like their real-world equivalent; completely intended to be handled in batch. Connectivity with trading partners is through connections, with names like AS2, sFTP, or X.400–all batch technologies, and many of them still operating on 10- to 15-minute cycles.
There is considerable effort and risk–along with minimal benefit–taking API technology into an EDI world.
Your elder EDI integration consultant will undoubtedly share many stories where an EDI message was implemented that never gets used or doesn’t deliver the benefit that was expected–despite an extensive effort to implement it.
A classic example is the Purchase Order Change (EDI 860) message. In most SAP implementations, once a Sales Order is entered, there are minimal opportunities to automatically change it. A Sales Order has been credit checked, inventory allocated, and items possibly already shipped. Expending the effort to fully integrate a complicated “Purchase Order Change” message, which is already a business exception that has minimal chance to actually update an SAP Sales Order, is likely not a good investment.
There is no shame in saying “no” to integrating some EDI messages and asking the business to just go manual.
EDI is a very mature technology that does mesh well to SAP S4/HANA but needs to be respected for what it is and what it is not. For further experience, insight, and guidance on integrating EDI with your SAP solution, I invite you to reach out to the experienced EDI integration consultants at Vortex Consulting. Contact us at 1.888.627.3640 today.
About the Author: Matthew Montano is a Vortex Consulting SAP architect with more than 25 years of experience in Electronic Data Interchange, Supply Chain Integration, and Third-Party Logistics. His passion for good documentation and streamlined work process has yielded measurable results for clients in the consumer packaged goods, life sciences, manufacturing, and transportation industries across both the United States and Canada.
SAP Architect Matthew Montano continues his series on the Vortex Consulting blog:
I think the Las Vegas odds are good that your SAP ERP system has a custom table starting with Z and a name like ‘XREF…’.
Why am I so sure that’s a safe bet?
After 25 years, I’ve seen far too many SAP functional consultants and developers stumble across a requirement where the answer is to utilize a cross reference table. The solution inevitably ends up being a custom database Z Table. (Of course, there is always the question as to why custom code was needed in the first place…you can read more about my thoughts on that in my previous blog post on custom SAP ABAP source code.)
More often than you realize, the implementation of a quick custom database Z Table means skipping all of the additional documentation that a custom solution would warrant. Conversely, using SAP in the manner it was intended can minimize or eliminate the need for additional documentation and security controls.
And, of course, quick solutions are almost always shortsighted–focusing on a solution for now and not how it might support the next similar requirement.
A good SAP functional consultant can avoid inadvertently creating a house of cards combination of custom tables and custom code and additional unique dependencies. You definitely want to avoid the “short blanket syndrome” where you leave your feet cold for no reason.
So here’s what the process might look like:
It all starts with a simple “If the Sales Area is X, then set the flag to Y.”
Everyone gets excited that the business requirement has been quickly addressed with the ~magic~ of the Z Table.
Then other custom functionality uses the same Z Table.
Then someone forgets to update the table.
Then someone updates it incorrectly (maybe with something as simple as entering an O versus a 0?).
Then someone forgets to update the documentation that describes how to update the table.
Then someone corrupts the table.
Then the table is not included in the system backup.
Then an auditor asks why a single user has single and solitary control over dozens of core functions of your SAP system.
It never ends well.
In almost all cases, your SAP functional consultant can offer a better solution that respects all key aspects:
Maintains data integrity
Ensures security
Delivers appropriate validation
It often takes a few extra lines of code to retrieve the data, but the benefits of everything that SAP already provides is almost free.
Below are some ideas so you too can avoid the dreaded Z Table.
Do you need a value that is different by customer, vendor, or material? Store it along with the rest of the Business Partner (Customer or Vendor) or Material data. There are numerous existing fields that might already suit your requirement. If not, adding additional characteristics is easy for a well-versed SAP functional consultant.
Do you need to track a value that varies by Sales Area or Purchasing Organization? Why not create a customer or vendor with a fixed partner number and store the data there?
For more complex requirements, SAP has built an entire toolkit named Business Rules Framework plus–or simply BRFplus–that provides an entire infrastructure to securely store and validate cross-reference data. A small learning curve can yield extensive benefits.
There are numerous other SAP-supported capabilities to store data within SAP GTS, SAP CRM, the IDoc/ALE Integration, and more. Use them!
So, the next time someone suggests using a Z Table to store data, stop them. It is absolutely worth the investment for the long-term stability of your solution to ensure that critical data is stored in the right place so it is subject to the correct validation, security, and retention controls.
If you feel your project needs assistance in finding better solutions to meet your business requirements, please do reach out to Vortex. SAP functional consultants are at the center of our ERP solutions offering. Contact us today to get the conversation started.
About the Author: Matthew Montano is a Vortex Consulting SAP architect with more than 25 years of experience in Electronic Data Interchange, Supply Chain Integration, and Third-Party Logistics. His passion for good documentation and streamlined work process has yielded measurable results for clients in the consumer packaged goods, life sciences, manufacturing, and transportation industries across both the United States and Canada.
