Start your engines…and accelerate Your SAP S/4HANA Journey with Vortex’s OnRamp Methodology

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.

Vortex OnRamp - Accelerate your SAP S/4HANA journey

What makes Vortex Consulting’s OnRamp Methodology stand out?

  1. Opportunity Outlook – Identifying opportunities to leverage additional SAP capabilities
  2. Nuanced Navigation – Engage in early planning to establish a solid project roadmap that is achievable on-time and on-budget
  3. Risk Reduction – Proactively tackling risks before the project starts will prevent rework or derailment in later phases
  4. Alignment Assessment – Assessing alignment between current processes, SAP best practices, and team readiness (OCM)
  5. Momentum Mapping – Mapping how to build and sustain momentum by pulling later-phased deliverables forward to declutter the Explore phase
  6. 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.

ERP done right—from day one!

Ready to get started with an OnRamp Assessment? https://go.vortexconsulting.net/vortex-sap-onramp-assessment-request

The SAP Talent Gap: Finding the Right Team of Experienced Consultants

The SAP talent gap has come to the forefront in industry conversations around digital transformation and mandatory upgrades forecasted for the next several years. This recent Forbes article shines a spotlight on the growing talent gap in the SAP ecosystem, particularly in relation to the migration of existing ERP systems to the S/4HANA platform. SAP has set a 2027 deadline for migrating legacy ERP systems to S/4HANA–and most of SAP’s 425,000 clients worldwide have not started their migrations yet. 

While SAP S/4HANA can be used both on premise and in the cloud, the benefits of utilizing cloud technology are continually growing, convincing more and more organizations to make its adoption a priority. Organizations that wait too long to make the transition to the cloud may face difficulties due to outdated infrastructure. For an increasing number of organizations, it just makes sense when migrating to S/4HANA to simultaneously manage a move to the cloud. 

With just 3 years remaining until the SAP deadline, it’s clear that there will be a surge in migration projects, leading to an unprecedented demand for qualified talent and a growing concern over the SAP talent gap. Many organizations will face challenges when recruiting top talent for their own teams and in finding partners with experienced consultants who are available.

Working with experienced SAP consultants is crucial for any organization looking to maximize the potential of SAP software and to reduce risk when executing SAP projects. SAP is a complex and constantly evolving platform; working with consultants who bring varied and robust experience to the table is essential to ensure successful implementation and ongoing support of the system. 

Statistics about SAP talent gap concerns for 2027

In the early 2000s, the push to offshore SAP project delivery work exposed challenges when working with less experienced resources. Many projects were delivered behind schedule, incurred cost overruns, and resulted in functional and technical issues post-delivery. It was not unusual to have to invest significant capital to re-implement and clean up the issues. This experience led to the onshoring of many roles and to changes in how companies engage offshore resources. Moreover, it highlighted the importance of finding experienced SAP consultants and employees with SAP skills.

Senior SAP consultants provide the following benefits: in-depth knowledge and expertise, business acumen and familiarity with industry-specific processes, the ability to handle different SAP modules and integrations, an understanding of system upgrades and changes, efficient problem-solving skills, deep industry contacts and network, exposure to different project types and sizes, and an understanding of best practices. Those advanced skills lead to faster deployment and implementation, cost and time savings, and overall lower project risk.

Vortex SAP consultants have 23 years of experience

The number of years of SAP experience is just one part of the equation when it comes to delivering a high-quality solution. At Vortex it is as much about understanding your corporate dynamic as knowing the SAP system. We take pride in forming true partnerships and working with our clients to find the best teams for their needs.     

In summary, it is expected to become more and more difficult to find the right resources given the growing SAP talent gap and the surge in demand to migrate to the cloud. Experienced consultants bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise, helping organizations to streamline processes, increase efficiency, and achieve their business goals with SAP. In this competitive business landscape, partnering with experienced SAP consultants can give businesses a competitive edge and ensure they are making the most of their SAP investment. At Vortex, we are confident that we bring the best teams in the industry to help our clients be successful. Send us an email to get a conversation started with a member of our senior leadership team today. 

SAP GRC: Digital Transformation Series, Part III

Today we continue our blog series on digital transformation. (For an overview on the topic, be sure to check out the first post in the series.) In our most recent post, we walked through 2 of 4 key areas to consider when it comes to digital transformation: Network security and SAP capabilities. Now, let’s take a look at the remaining key areas: Governance, risk management, and compliance–collectively known as GRC–and physical security. 

Consider these 3 main components to GRC: SAP Security, SAP Early Watch (pattern recognition), and Audit. Another way to think about GRC is establishing logical boundaries around roles and responsibilities and each employee’s related system access. In other words, no single person can complete all steps in the process. Here’s an example: If you cut the purchase order, you cannot be the one who approves the payment.

GRC can be difficult to design, implement, SAP GRC Best Practices for Business Securityand maintain successfully. It requires someone–or a team–with experience. You need to ensure that the right people have the right access to be able to do their jobs. At the same time, it is vital that the “slice of the pie” each employee sees is necessary to their role, defined, and secured. Also, this is not a “one and done” scenario. As the business evolves and changes, so do the roles and the unique access that each of the roles has within the organization. Strategic role design and maintenance is an ongoing process which is critical to the security of your organization.

Uniquely, the concern around establishing best practices in GRC is not about “getting hacked,” as it is for many aspects of digital business management. The focus is on limiting scenarios where someone may see a vulnerability and use it to defraud you. Controlling employee access is critical to limit opportunities for fraudulent behavior– but that access control is not limited to only employees.

In today’s interconnected environment, your vendors, suppliers, and customers may all have access points into your system. These access points all need security roles assigned to them to limit the view to only the appropriate and relevant information for the actor’s role. As an example, an external actor could see proprietary information and sell it to a competitor. Each partner or vendor should only see what is most relevant to and required for their specific role in the larger process.

Within your organization’s SAP framework, BPML–Business Process Mapping List–establishes employee and vendor access. GRC creates profiles in such a way that it encircles all relevant functionality before linking that role to a person. The truth of the matter is that many companies give people way too much access by accident!

GRC SAP Digital and Physical SecurityStandard SAP GRC risk detection and auditing settings compile reports and grant access to internal and external audits. This allows pattern recognition functionality to detect where key elements of your security infrastructure may have changed unexpectedly or where other gaps in the system may exist.

That brings us to Number 4: physical security. Identification procedures fall into this category–being sure that someone cannot get in, pretending to be someone they are not. Along those lines, when a consultant’s contract ends, it’s crucial to lock out their access immediately so that they can no longer access the premises, or the sensitive systems inside the premises. Whether you are building from the ground up, undergoing an expansion, or moving to a “new to you” space, make physical security a part of the discussion upfront.

As explored through our 3-part series, digital transformation and security is a broad-reaching topic that weaves into all aspects of your business. A successful digital ERP implementation or upgrade is based on a holistic view of security structure including external partners, project teams, and internal resources. Invest in bringing together these moving pieces to ensure a secure digital and physical environment for your organization’s assets. If you have questions about digital upgrades in SAP and Oracle, want to talk about staffing support options, or even need to fill a role immediately, be sure to contact us today. We look forward to helping you optimize your business operations as the digital world continues to grow and evolve.

Network Security & SAP Capabilities: Digital Transformation Series, Part II

Welcome to the second post in our blog series on digital transformation. As mentioned in our series kickoff, digital transformation security can be divided into four key areas: network security, SAP capabilities, SAP GRC (roles and access), and physical security. Let’s dive right into what those categories include, beginning with network security.

If you were to bring up the topic of technological security with a group of colleagues, chances are it’s network security that would first come up in discussion. Intrusion and phishing are a few of the main areas that fall into this category. In the case of intrusion, we’re talking about the detection of network entry without proper authorization. And, unfortunately, we’ve all seen phishing in action–fraudulent messages that seek to obtain personal, valuable information, and designed to look as though they were from a reputable organization. In order to maintain a truly secure system, all access points into your network, such as VPNs, need to be secured. The Vortex team is very aware of these threats and makes network security an integral part of every project, whether that’s including our own security experts in a full staffing scenario or collaborating with your on-staff security team during an SAP setup or upgrade.

This brings us to the second key area of digital security–SAP capabilities, our sweet spot. A core feature of SAP is that it helps to establish baseline security patterns, then detects when there are variations from those base guidelines. SAP is loaded with inherent process-based security capabilities that work toward detecting and preventing fraud and architecture issues:

  • Optical Scanning Tools, used in tandem with AI for managing and securing invoicing practices
  • Dispute Management tools for detecting irregularities in disputes or payments
  • Quality Management and audits for dealing with claims that there is an issue with your product quality
  • Accounts Receivable and Incoming Payments tools for analyzing who you owe and who owes you
  • Tools for detecting Internal Issues, such as identifying “bad apples” who may be trying to defraud the company
  • Tools for detecting Money Routing Irregularities by visualizing patterns where company money is moving

Machines and systems can recognize patterns in a way that humans cannot. Humans have the ingenuity, once these critical pieces of information are identified, to see things from different angles and make sense of situational information based on experience and expertise. It’s the experience of our senior leadership team and vast network of consultants that allows Vortex to recognize capabilities and apply them in unique ways for the benefit of our clients.

Network security and SAP capabilities are 2 of the 4 critical areas SAP Cloud symbol for network securitycomprising your holistic security architecture, and when discussing these, there’s another topic that cannot be excluded from the conversation–understanding security of cloud vs. on-premise. Simply said, the more you go on-premise with your SAP investment, the more SAP performance ability you give up. The powerful SAP cloud platform has stronger capabilities and is a sound, secure choice for your business in the long term.

What questions do you have about network security for SAP? Drop us a line or reach out on social media: LinkedIn and Twitter. Tune in for the next in our series on digital transformation security, where we’ll discuss GRC and physical security, coming soon here on the Vortex Consulting blog. 

Digital Transformation Security Goes Beyond Network Security

Digital transformation is a hot topic these days–but in reality it’s not a new one. Professionals in the ERP technology space have been moving businesses from old technology platforms to cutting edge software for over 30 years. Here at Vortex Consulting, we’ve been in business for 25 years, working in digital transformation–as seen in products like Oracle Cloud and SAP S/4HANA. Continue reading this first blog post in our new series and follow along for others in the upcoming months.

So why has research and development surrounding digital transformation been deemed so critical for over 3 decades? A key reason: efficiency. Digitizing workflow, storage, and processes in general means eliminating time-consuming, repetitive, inefficient tasks. It brings meaningful and successful automation to standard business processes, all while integrating data efficiently. As an example, let’s look at the process of invoicing. Long gone are the days of needing to manually scan an invoice, organize paper files, collect and match up payments, etc. All of this can be done digitally–it’s streamlined, takes less time and energy, and frees up employees to do more valuable work. Product orders are even transferred to third party logistics providers who automatically determine the most efficient delivery routes, can combine loads, and automatically select the lowest cost delivery options. 

Business owner with SAP compares low cost delivery options

There are newer technologies coming into play that add to the discussion of what is possible in digital transformation. The Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), data lakes, and improved pattern detection capabilities are each transformative in their own right. At the time of publishing this post, discussions about AI are dominating social spaces as its uses are tested in education, healthcare, information management, and beyond. 

Female business owner monitors SAP digital transformation

As application specialists, Vortex works in the realm of these digital technologies on every project. The SAP platform is at the core of the system, with SAP and third party satellites communicating as a network, enabling automation and digital flows of information–all of which must be secured. (Our work with Oracle-based clients functions in a similar way.) Adding to the complexity of the situation, there are always evolving technologies which require the integration of handheld devices, sensors, and portals that extend the network and must be integrated into SAP. With the introduction of more middleware tools to the SAP setup, those assets must be secured as well.

When it comes to digital transformation security, we’ve learned there are really 4 buckets: network security, SAP capabilities, SAP GRC (roles and access), and physical security. Throughout this blog post series, we’ll take a deep dive into each of those key areas. If you have questions you’d like us to address, reach out on Twitter or send an email to let us know. Watch for the next in our digital transformation security series soon.

How to Start your SAP S/4HANA Journey: Insight First

From guest authors Sven Wierzbicki and John Louw. The second in our blog series on “How to Start your SAP S/4HANA Journey.”

As discussed in the first chapter of this series, there are many ways to reach the goal of successfully deploying SAP S/4HANA in your enterprise. Today’s post will focus on identifying the right starting point in your Business Intelligence environment. 

Let’s rewind a couple of years. You might recall SAP’s implied effort to “embrace divergence.” BusinessObjects (BOBJ), Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), Business Configuration (BC), and Integrated Planning (IP) were just some of the new tools thrown at us. Now the fog has lifted and we are in front of a new maze: “in” or “on” HANA, embedded, hybrid, cloud-based. Allow us to offer guidance and a helping hand in sorting out this new mystery. It matters–a lot!

How to Deploy SAP S4HANA Graphic
Photo credit: SAP

 

Think about your planning efforts to get to a budget, to the projected sales figures, or to other important KPIs within the enterprise. Some people love Excel, some hate it. Others cannot live without their cloud tools like Salesforce. And really no one should have to choose a tool that is not up to the task. Why does this matter? You can build the starting point of your S/4HANA journey around this thought!

Consider the following sequence that puts the focus on Business Intelligence first:

1) Upgrade SAP Business Warehouse (BW) – Assuming that you have an existing Business Warehouse environment, consider upgrading to BW on HANA (database upgrade only). It is a right first step into the new world of HANA. It allows your technical resources to understand the new capabilities of the database and builds a solid foundation for your business intelligence environment. Also, it can be done in 2-3 months with very limited impact on the business. All existing objects, like InfoCubes, providers, and queries, will still work.

2) Deploy SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) – Embrace the different facets of the BPC tool, either as an all-in for planning and consolidation, or any subset of it. Here’s a strong example: the embedded planning capabilities allow for utilizing the modern database capabilities of HANA.

3) Transition Business Warehouse Capabilities – Over a period of time, transition your BW InfoCubes, providers, etc. to the new HANA technology. This allows time to prepare your system for the next step of the journey. 

4) Upgrade to BW/4HANA – Your BW is now ready to be upgraded from BW on HANA to BW/4HANA, allowing your enterprise to embrace the full capabilities of HANA.

5) Deploy and Connect SAP Analytics Cloud – Take the integration of all your planning capabilities to the next level. This will allow you to have each department working in their tool of choice and connect them into a real-time master plan.

Taking this multi-phased approach puts you on a strategic path toward a digital boardroom. It does not
dictate the pace of the operations going to S/4HANA. It can also be done in parallel to an overhaul of the operational SAP systems at any given stage of the road map as the ties between the ERP and the Business Warehouse stay intact:

Upgrade to SAP B4HANA Series

  • R/3 to BW on HANA, or
  • R/3 to BW/4HANA, or
  • S/4 to BW on HANA, or
  • S/4 to BW/4HANA, or 
  • S/4 with embedded BW

The choice is yours, and the pace is not externally dictated–a truly tailored approach with focus on the insights first!

In our next post, we’ll address the “Central Finance First” option, talking about a sidecar solution as the starting point. Click here to catch up on our first post in the series, “How to Start Your SAP S/4HANA Journey: Three Unique Approaches.” Stay tuned for our next chapter!