An SAP customer since 1998, J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc., a North American leader in safety and regulatory compliance solutions, recently migrated from its long-held legacy SAP ECC system to SAP S/4HANA, having been motivated by the approaching 2027 end-of-maintenance deadline for SAP Business Suite 7.
“The clock was ticking on ECC; that was the biggest driver,” said Josh Djupstrom, Vice President of IT at J. J. Keller. Alongside other company leaders, Djupstrom did not want the organization to delay its upgrade until closer to the end-of-support date and risk facing a shortage of qualified implementation partners.
Such anticipatory planning positioned the company ahead of what will likely become an increasingly crowded field of organizations rushing to meet the deadline. Yet J. J. Keller resisted treating this migration as merely a technical necessity, instead transforming potential disruption into a strategic advantage.
The enterprise devoted six months to crafting its transformation roadmap before choosing a specific approach. Only after executive leadership reviewed and endorsed the plan did it evaluate potential partners, eventually choosing SAP’s Accelerated Implementation Services.
The “Lift and Shift” Approach
Many organizations attempt to combine technical migration with business process overhaul in digital transformation projects. J. J. Keller’s IT leadership, who will be speaking at the upcoming SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, deliberately chose a different path, drawing on their collective implementation experience to chart a more measured course.
Challenging prevailing transformation philosophies, Djupstrom shared the team’s core principle: “You have to be on the platform before you can do the digital transformation. If you bundle everything together, it all fails together.”
Instead, the team embraced a classic “lift and shift” strategy, establishing a stable SAP S/4HANA foundation first before tackling process reengineering.
Eric Leicht, Data Architect at J. J. Keller, reinforced this pragmatic stance: “Avoid the big bang type of project where you’re trying to throw all kinds of things in and go live all at one time. Do it in phases and provide value as you go.”
July 2023 marked hardware procurement for the RISE with SAP implementation, followed by project initiation with SAP in late September. The organization’s implementation unfolded in distinct phases:
- Replace the legacy launchpad with SAP Build Work Zone in November
- Migrate SAP BW/4HANA system to RISE with SAP in December
- Complete MII migration in February 2024
- Push SAP S/4HANA live in May 2024
Breaking the project into sequential phases created tangible wins every few months, rather than asking stakeholders to wait for a single big-bang payoff. The company’s 2,000 associates received ongoing improvements every few months, creating momentum that cascaded into enthusiastic support for subsequent phases.
Preceding the formal S/4HANA digital transformation project, another strategic decision would prove crucial. Pavan Pati, SAP Architect for J. J. Keller, noted that when the organization acquired the RISE with platform, it upgraded its SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) license to Enterprise Edition, and proactively moved all interface endpoints to BTP. These actions reduced integration testing complexity during the subsequent S/4HANA implementation.
Through this move, the BTP became both an immediate migration facilitator and a foundation for future innovation, including potentially moving customizations out of the back end.
The Migration Blueprint
J. J. Keller’s successful migration relied on both its strategic approach and careful attention to execution details. Several key elements distinguished this approach from other implementation projects.
Djupstrom emphasized that halting demand management was a top priority, as it both freed resources to focus on the project and prevented constant changes from creating moving targets. Achieving this required a “bottom-up to top-down” approach—communicating needs to executives who then implemented necessary changes across the organization.
Technical prerequisites demanded careful attention before S/4HANA migration could begin. The J. J. Keller team implemented SAP Revenue Accounting and Reporting to replace deprecated ECC functionality while also tackling Customer Vendor Integration (CVI), a process Pati identified as a critical learning opportunity.
“If I had to redo it again, I would recommend performing CVI integration upfront in production,” Pati advised. For an organization of J. J. Keller’s scale, this proactive approach could compress a multi-month process into mere days during cutover.
Security management, which is vitally important to J. J. Keller, presented unexpected complexity that challenged initial resource projections. “The area that we were slow on was around security and roles and authorizations,” admitted Leicht. The ERP platform transition involved extensive security role changes requiring thorough testing and significantly more resources than anticipated.
At the heart of J. J. Keller’s execution strategy stood a comprehensive migration runbook. What began as a modest 50-task outline evolved through multiple iterations into an exhaustive 500-step playbook. Djupstrom drily noted that, by the end, “when someone had to sneeze at this point, it was written in a runbook.”
By the production migration, the sixth time executing the process, the team had refined its approach to near perfection, consistently hitting timeline targets or finishing early.
Selecting RISE with SAP necessitated six months of negotiation to finalize the five-year contract. Though negotiations stretched over six months, this extended planning horizon forced them to forecast technology needs years in advance—strengthening the enterprise’s bargaining position and locking in predictable costs that executives could confidently budget against through 2028.
Moving to RISE shifted how the enterprise operated day-to-day, particularly for tasks previously handled by internal teams. Functions previously handled by internal teams now required coordination with SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services group. Though this shift introduced new processes, it also redistributed responsibility. “It takes some of the dependency off of you and makes you lean further on your partners. If they break it, it’s on them to fix it,” noted Leicht.
A Seamless Transition
May 2024 marked the completion of J. J. Keller’s nine-month S/4HANA implementation—under budget and with minimal operational disruption. The most telling measure of success came not from project metrics but user experience, and it was measured in terms of an overall lack of conspicuous downtime during cutover.
“When our business folks left the office on Friday of the cutover weekend and had access again Monday morning at six o’clock, the success of the project was entirely transparent to them,” said Djupstrom. “If there hadn’t been all kinds of communication telling them what we were doing, they would never have known.”
In first moving the SAP BW system over, as part of the S/4HANA implementation, Leicht reflected that he knew they’d succeeded when executive leaders asked after the fact if the move had taken place. “We were able to do the project without people knowing that we’d moved from on-prem to the cloud,” he said. “They didn’t notice it, because everything worked.”
The cloud migration additionally set up the organization to tackle a long-standing data management challenge. With storage costs directly impacting monthly bills, Djupstrom found the leverage he needed to finally implement data purging and archiving protocols—tasks that had been set aside for years in favor of more urgent priorities. Through conversations with departments across the organization, the team established retention policies for different data types, eliminating unnecessary historical information and creating leaner systems.
J. J. Keller’s RISE with SAP implementation delivered another often-elusive benefit: financial predictability. Djupstrom explained that, upon signing the contract, the team knew exactly what its SAP expenditures would be through 2028. “CFOs and CEOs love that predictability. There are no surprises. They know what the spend is going to be,” he said.
Early executive involvement in roadmap planning secured buy-in for future phases while guiding product acquisition timing. The team purchased SAP S/4HANA Advanced Variant Configuration, SAP Analytics Cloud, and additional solutions planned subsequently—all approved during initial contract negotiations, eliminating annual budget battles for technology investments.
The BTP environment quickly demonstrated value in phase two projects. Pati described its emerging role as an intermediary layer between systems, reducing development efforts in current initiatives by streamlining communication between back-end systems and interfaces.
Operational changes accompanied the RISE transition. Tasks previously handled internally now require SAP coordination but with compensating advantages, like SAP patching and upgrading the system.
Building on the S/4HANA Foundation
Having migrated to SAP S/4HANA, J. J. Keller has shifted focus to its phase two initiatives centering on manufacturing modernization and sales optimization. After going live in May 2024, the organization began the business process transformation at the end of summer.
The BTP environment established during migration provides a foundation for adopting emerging technologies. With BTP already in place, implementing AI services becomes straightforward—essentially just increasing the organization’s credit consumption under its enterprise agreement without requiring additional infrastructure.
Pati outlined three primary directions for ongoing BTP expansion: leveraging API management in manufacturing modernization to streamline system interactions, extending SAP Fiori application development beyond their initial successful deployment, and exploring “clean core” approaches to relocate customizations from S/4HANA to BTP. The organization already deployed one custom Fiori application, with plans to roll out more Fiori applications on the platform.
“As we delivered all those systems, we were able to shut off systems that were in our data center on-premises, and turn off that hardware and start using the hardware and RISE,” noted Leicht. “We were doing the shift to the cloud as well as getting us to the future platforms.”
J. J. Keller’s experience offers insights into its approach, which combines planning, executive alignment, and careful execution. The decision to separate platform migration from business transformation helped them create a manageable approach that delivered value throughout the process while establishing a foundation for future work.
As J. J. Keller advances through phase two, its measured strategy continues to pay dividends. By avoiding a scramble to meet the end-of-maintenance deadline, manufacturing modernization and sales optimization can now progress on a stable S/4HANA foundation.
The three tech leaders will delve deeper into J. J. Keller’s transformation journey at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference. Find out more here.