RNXT

How InsurTech is reshaping insurance industry with emerging technological trends

RNXT — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 16:49:06 +0000

The goal for every type of insurer—Property and Casualty(P&C), life, health, and more— is to remain competitive and improve speed-to-market while fulfilling evolving client needs. And this is made possible by the industry experts by keeping pace with the Insurtech movement of harnessing new digital capabilities. Today, with the emergence of innovative technological services and solutions, getting insurance quotes can be as easy as clicking a button, managing coverage can typically be achieved via a mobile app, and paper insurance cards are mostly outdated.

Modern technology in the insurance industry provides game-changing solutions to fill gaps in both capabilities and offerings and thereby enhance processes across the insurance value chain.
These emerging technologies help address customer demand, create efficiencies, and reduce costs in the insurance industry.

While adapting to the recent insurance technologies was a difficult experience for many carriers, it enormously benefitted those who did. From underwriting and claims to the customer journey and distribution techniques, let us look at the top insurance technology trends that’s disrupting the insurance sector, including telematics, drones, AI, wearables, robo-advisors, and virtual reality.

BLOCKCHAIN

For an industry that relies on troves of secure data, blockchain technology could trigger “the transformation of business transactions and information exchange and disposal of high-cost layers of overhead dedicated to verification. It provides the digital resources and hub for the smooth flow of data streams and transactions.
Blockchain technology is being used to create efficient claims management, greater security of data and reducing fraud. This provides many benefits for both the insurer and consumers by disrupting the current system that can be time consuming, prone to errors and offers low transparency. Blockchain’s impact will be seen in consumer trust, Enhanced efficiencies, Improved claims processing, Fraud detection and prevention.

TELEMATICS

Telematics is allowing carriers to capture user data and create personalized usage-based insurance products. The use of telematics technology is a means for insurers to reward safer drivers by providing them with reduced premiums It can also assist auto carriers in saving money on fraudulent or inaccurate claims aside from providing usage-based insurance and personalized discounts.
For ex, Telematics can be thought more like a wearable technology for your car in insurance technology. Cars can now be equipped with monitoring devices — think Progressive’s Snapshot — that measure various indicators like data on speed, location, accidents, and more, which is all monitored and processed with analytics software to help determine the policy premium.
The benefits of telematics are plentiful for both insurers and insureds. Telematics in P&C insurance will: Lower claims costs for insurers and Change carrier to customer relationships from reactive to proactive.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly expanded with Insurers using advanced algorithms to improve the underwriting process and provide better customer analytics. The key to meet the high-speed demands of modern clients is to use AI’s capabilities to leverage the vast amounts of consumer data available to create personalized experiences based on an individual’s behavior and habits.
Additionally, with AI insurers can improve claims turnaround cycles. AI also allows insurers to access data more quickly and cut out human element leading to more accurate reporting.
AI’s initial impact will become profound over time with identifying, evaluating, and underwriting emerging risks and identifying new revenue sources.

MACHINE LEARNING

Machine learning enables the digital files and the ones accessible via cloud to be analyzed using pre-programmed algorithms, improving processing speed and accuracy. It can not only improve claims processing but can even automate it. This automated review can impact more than just claims it can also be used for policy administration and risk assessment.
Machine learning also prevents fraud by using large data sets to produce predictions based on known outcomes.

INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT)

Internet of Things (IoT) is a means for insurance companies to automate much of the data shared by consumers and use data from IoT devices such as the components of smart homes, automobile sensors, and wearable technologies to better determine rates, mitigate risk, and even prevent losses in the first place. Insurance companies can monitor and track the condition of insured assets, gather data on usage habits, predict when devices may fail and more providing many benefits for both the insurer and customers by reducing claims costs that result from accidents or poor handling of devices.
IoT will bolster other insurance technology with first-hand data, improving the accuracy of risk assessment, giving insureds more power to directly impact their policy pricing, and insurers the opportunity to improve accuracy and revenues.

LOW CODE

Traditionally, digital transformation depended on expensive IT talent to implement and manage various digital channels. But with the advent of low-code and no-code platforms today, insurers can deploy updates, and get to market with new products efficiently and accurately. new advances in software-specific coding platforms have made this process easier than ever before. Low-code configuration tools allow business stakeholders to update and manage apps and software using an intuitive, user-friendly drag and drop functionality. insurers will be able to quickly implement new and different user interface (UI) features that customers demand, in a fraction of the time usually required. The biggest benefits of low-code development are – Drastically increased speed to market and the ability to build foundational features that can be expanded upon.

VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS (CHATBOTS) AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (NLP)

Utilizing AI and machine learning, conversational AI-based chatbots can interact with customers seamlessly, saving everyone within an organization time – and saving insurance companies money. A bot can walk a customer through a policy application or claims process, reserving human intervention for more complex cases.
Geico’s “Kate” is a virtual assistant that communicates with customers via text or voice, aiding in policy questions and coverage inquiries, available 24/7.
Insurers can drastically reduce costs and turn-around time by adopting such high-quality digital assistants

DRONES AND ROBO ADVISORS

Unmanned drones are an insurance technology tool that will be utilized more by carriers in coming years. They can be used across many stages of the insurance lifecycle – collecting data to calculate risk before issuing a policy, aiding in preventative maintenance, and assessing damage following a loss. Farmers Insurance is a notable example, as they deploy Kespry drones to aid risk and damage assessment on homes. These drones perform roof inspections and other assessments, and the drones transmit their data to the cloud for analysis. This is yet another instance of IoT and other technologies working together in the insurance industry. Today, many insurers are expanding the use of drones and robotics to offer better risk management and improve claims efficiency.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS

Predictive analytics works by taking historical data and feeding it into models that are trained over time (machine learning), generating predictions about trends and behavior patterns. This enables insurance companies to make informed decisions about quoting, workload optimization, product recommendations, and more.
During quoting, insurers can leverage machine learning algorithms to process historical or synthetic data to identify the most successful sold plan designs for specific group sizes and industries, speeding up the sale of a new plan. Off late, insurance companies can use predictive analysis for Identifying customers at risk of cancellation, Pricing, and risk selection, identifying risk of fraud, triaging claims and Identifying outlier claims

Insurance carriers are always searching for the newest and best developments in insurance technology to not just stay ahead of their competitors, but also deliver the experiences customers expect in the modern market
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SAP ARIBA – The cloud based solution for Purchase & Procurement

varsha@rnxt.com — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 06:41:06 +0000

SAP Ariba is the right tool for businesses of any size looking for a procurement platform that fulfils the needs of both suppliers and buyers. If you are looking for a cloud based innovative solution that helps suppliers and buyers to connect and do business on a single platform, SAP Ariba is your answer. It provides less costly ways of procurement and helps improve the overall vendor management system of an organization and makes business simple. Ariba ensures a true collaboration between buyers and sellers. Ariba provides tools and dashboards to reach reduced inventory levels by leveraging real-time demand and supply forecasting by integrating your supplier’s operations with Ariba Network.

Main features of SAP Ariba are:

Supply chain collaboration
Ariba Exchange
Strategic sourcing
Procurement
Supplier discovery
Strategic sourcing
Invoice management
Dynamic discounting
Payments
Contract management
Spend analysis
Supplier management
Financial supply chain management

ARIBA – S/4 Hana Integration

End-to-end process management is supported by SAP Ariba and it is also integrated with S/4 Hana. It comes with advanced negotiation and supplier selection functions. The entire process of communicating and submitting information regarding prices, agreements and negotiations can be managed directly within two interfaces: The supplier portal and the buyer portal, where the both are connected through SAP Ariba Network. In Ariba account settings, you have direct connectivity option to directly connect S/4 Hana and Ariba. For customers leveraging suite solutions from SAP, a functional buyer working in SAP S/4HANA Cloud can leverage SAP Ariba for sourcing their requirements and making a contract that is made available for future call-offs against the contract within SAP S/4HANA Cloud. With guided buying, a casual user can requisition contracted items from a catalogue and create the purchase requisition in SAP S/4HANA Cloud that can be aggregated to create a purchase order and sent to the supplier in the Ariba Network. The supplier can further collaborate on the purchase order confirmation, shipment, and invoices with the buyer and the accounts payable users in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Customers will have a seamless experience when they use capabilities across SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA Cloud to complete the end-to-end process.

In a new world filled with uncertainties and unprecedented worldwide economic slowdown, access to an effective, fully integrated supply chain system that allows you to collaborate with your current suppliers, while also giving you the opportunity to discover new ones – all provided through a single point of access – is what differentiates SAP solutions from the rest of the pack.

Azure Arc Multi-Cloud Management Service and Arc-Enabled Services

kornwill — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 02:44:21 +0000

Administrators handling hybrid environments are tasked with managing both on-premises environments with traditional Windows Server management tools and cloud environments, such as Microsoft Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). To handle the resources on-premises as an extension of Azure cloud IaaS environment, Microsoft presented a new solution, Azure Arc that can help bring the on-premises workloads into the management capacity of Microsoft Azure. Azure Arc offers simplified management, faster app development, and consistent Azure services to work with multi-cloud, on-premises, and edge environments and help consolidate control of all resources and help to streamline control of servers.

The advantages of Azure Arc are:

Azure arc eliminates the need to use numerous tools and dashboards which can be inefficient and inconvenient. Instead, it allows in consolidating management of resources under Azure Dashboard for Unified management across cloud, on-premises, and edge.
Azure offers unlimited scalability by harnessing the power of cloud automation working with Azure Arc. We can scale up new instances as well as scale workloads in lesser time based on capacity.
Azure security with the likes of Azure Security Center and Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) protecting workloads is extended to on-premises and edge workloads.

Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by offering a stable multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Azure Arc also enables us to manage entire environment by projecting existing non-Azure, on-premises, or other-cloud resources into Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Manage virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they are running in Azure and use familiar Azure services and management capabilities, regardless of where they reside.

Azure Arc allows us to manage the following resource types hosted outside of Azure:

Servers – both physical and virtual machines running Windows or Linux.
Kubernetes clusters – supporting multiple Kubernetes distributions.
Databases (Azure data services) – Azure SQL database and PostgreSQL Hyperscale services.

AZURE ARC-ENABLED SERVERS

Azure Arc-enabled servers enables to manage Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure, on corporate network, or other cloud provider. This management experience is designed to be in harmony with how you manage native Azure VMs. When a hybrid machine is connected to Azure, it becomes a connected machine and is treated as a resource in Azure. Each connected machine has a Resource ID enabling the machine to be included in a resource group.

Azure Arc-enabled servers provides:

The flexibility to work for both Linux and Windows, Works with virtual machines (VMs), and other clouds and is also Domain-agnostic.
At a management level, it has a searchable inventory at scale, offering the same server management experience across environments and consistent VM Extensions for agent management.
For Governance and security, it has built-in Azure policies for servers, server security baselines with an ability to view and search for noncompliant servers across environments and advanced data security.
A role-based access control with Central IT–based, at-scale operations and is Integrated with Azure Lighthouse for managed service providers.

AZURE ARC-ENABLED KUBERNETES

With Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, businesses can configure Kubernetes clusters either inside or outside Microsoft Azure. When administrators connect their Kubernetes clusters into Azure Arc, administrators can see the K8s clusters in the Azure Resource Manager like a native Azure resource, including ARM ID. The Kubernetes resources are then placed in the Azure subscription and resource group and can be configured with tags and other metadata like other native Azure resources.

Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes provides:

Flexibility in terms of container platform of client’s choice, Out-of-the-box support for most CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)–certified Kubernetes and Use across dev, test, and production Kubernetes clusters.
At a management level, it helps Inventory, organize, and tag Kubernetes clusters, deploy apps and configuration as code using GitOps and Monitor and Manage at scale with policy-based deployment.
Built-in Kubernetes Gatekeeper policies to apply consistent security configuration at scale, consistent cluster extensions for Azure monitoring, governance, security services, and more.
Another significant benefit with Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters is implementing Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Kubernetes with Central IT-based at-scale operations and Management by workload owner based on access privileges.

AZURE ARC-ENABLED DATA SERVICES

Azure Arc makes it possible to run Azure data services on-premises, at the edge, and in public clouds using Kubernetes and the infrastructure of your choice. Currently, the following Azure Arc-enabled data services are available:

SQL Managed Instance
PostgreSQL Hyperscale.

The benefits of Azure Arc-enabled data services are:

Azure Arc-enabled data services such as Azure Arc-enabled SQL managed instance and Azure Arc-enabled PostgreSQL Hyperscale receive updates on a frequent basis including servicing patches and new features and hence always stays current.
Database-as-a-service benefits including automation for setting up high availability and elastic scaling without application downtime. This capability gives data workloads an additional boost on capacity optimization, using unique scale-out reads and writes.
Unified management with familiar tools such as the Azure portal, Azure Data Studio, and the Azure CLI and a modern cloud billing model for hybrid infrastructure.
Azure Arc has a self-service provisioning and provides other cloud benefits such as fast deployment and automation at scale. Thanks to Kubernetes-based orchestration, you can deploy a database in seconds using either GUI or CLI tools.

In conclusion, Azure Arc is a great tool and solution from Microsoft to help consolidate the many control planes that often exist when dealing with cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Using Azure Arc will help to bring all these resources under one umbrella of control and automation tools.

Multi Account Management with AWS Control Tower, Its Limitations And Best Practices

kornwill — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 02:05:03 +0000

Organizations that are heavy users of AWS often battle to maintain a supervision amid a wealth of corporate accounts. Most times, companies will have business rules, policies, and processes to single out various constituencies across the business. One way to streamline such a widespread and diverse base of public cloud users is to execute multiple cloud accounts which assigns one account to each primary usage group where users, service permissions, billing and other facets of the account might differ significantly from other groups. Using multiple smaller accounts has many benefits, including easier portability if any firm opts to migrate to a different cloud, quick comebacks to security breaches by detecting and isolating that account etc.

Control Tower is a service devised to aid organizations in AWS multi-account management within AWS cloud environments. Amazon added AWS Control Tower to address such issues and give admins the ability to manage multiple cloud accounts through one interface. It offers a very straightforward approach to set up and govern an AWS multi-account environment.

AWS Control Tower provides an effortless way called a landing zone for this purpose following all regulatory best practices. AWS Control Tower orchestrates the capacities of various other AWS services, including AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Single Sign-on, to build a landing zone. AWS Control Tower also establishes blueprints, which are policies a company’s accounts must stick to. The blueprints encapsulate workflows and best practices for identity and access management, security, monitoring, logging and so on. AWS customers can implement AWS Control Tower, extend authority into new or existing accounts, and gain visibility into their compliance status quickly. If you are building a new AWS environment, starting out on your journey to AWS or starting a new cloud initiative, Control Tower will help you get started quickly with governance and best practices built in.

AWS Control Tower has the following features:

Landing zone – A landing zone is a well-architected, multi-account environment that is based on security and compliance best practices A landing zone can scale to fit the needs of an enterprise of any size.
Guardrails – A guardrail is a high-level rule that provides ongoing governance for your entire AWS environment. Three categories of guidance apply to the two kinds (preventive and detective) Guardrails: Mandatory, Strongly recommended, or Elective.
Account Factory – An Account Factory is a configurable account template that helps to standardize the provisioning of new accounts with pre-approved account configurations.
Dashboard – The dashboard offers continuous oversight of your landing zone to your team of central cloud administrators.

Although a Control Tower can be the best answer for organizations that struggle to manage multiple cloud accounts, it is vital to understand the service’s limitations and let’s look at some best practices for multi-account management in AWS.

LIMITATIONS OF AWS CONTROL TOWER

Although the premise of AWS Control Tower is convincing, the service has notable constraints.

The primary concern is the overall requirement for new accounts. AWS Control Tower does not support existing accounts or sub-accounts presently, so companies that already use AWS will have to create/ re-create accounts from scratch to handle them through the Control Tower.

Each AWS service enforces its own usage limits — or quotas, as AWS calls them. There are also functional quotas in memory, timeouts, space allocated to environment variables, space for policies, burst concurrency, invocation frequency, payload size and more.

Some Amazon cloud services, or settings may not be fully compatible with AWS Control Tower, like AWS Organizations. Admins can establish permission guardrails in AWS Organizations, (Organizational Unit) OU’s created outside of any the service will not be supported by Control Tower. Thus, pre-existing OUs are not supported in AWS Control Tower.

One of the best approaches to implementing the AWS Control Tower is to start small with new account deployments and build your service use over time. It is not necessarily applicable for existing, large multi-account deployments.

MULTI-ACCOUNT BEST PRACTICES

Despite such management challenges, there are still significant best practices that can help to facilitate multi-account environments in Amazon’s cloud.

Selecting regions carefully

When consolidating multiple accounts through a tool such as AWS Control Tower, the selection of a “home” region is particularly important since the accounts generated through the tool will be created within the selected region. Since not every cloud service from amazon is available in all regions, it is better to create accounts in the regions where all services and resources required to deploy a workload is available. Creating accounts in multiple regions is also useful so that resources and workloads can be deployed closer to users.

Refine resources

Organizations that use and manage multiple account users and managers find it frustrating that resources and services available in one account might not be available in other accounts. It is the responsibility of the account admin to allow access to all the resources required to support the services and workloads under an account once its created. This reduces costs and limits attack vectors. It is vital to communicate those parameters to users of each account.

Some businesses choose to standardize a minimum suite of services to institute a common foundation of resources for all accounts, but the onus is on the account owners to outline what is or is not available.

Salesforce Integration Patterns Using Mulesoft

kornwill — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 01:01:45 +0000

Salesforce has been helping organizations in handling their customer databases for more than two decades now. It allows to deliver the right blend of process automation and customization solutions to tailor their services based on the individual requirements of the clients. However, to extend the functionalities of the CRM giant and provide a seamless customer, employee, and delivery experience, organizations need to merge with other suitable platforms. And this can be made possible with the help of Salesforce Integrations. MuleSoft provides the most widely used integration platform for connecting SaaS & enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premises. MuleSoft’s integration platform not only enables the access to data across legacy systems, cloud apps and devices but also makes smarter and faster decisions and offer highly connected experiences for end-users. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is now a part of the Salesforce Integration Cloud, which is a unified, single solution for iPaaS and a full life-cycle API management. With its major components like Anypoint Security, Design Center and Management Center, it is easier for organizations to synchronize data between all their systems. It also helps speed up and improve the application development process, unlock dislocated data, and maintain security while scaling. Any organization approaches integration of applications based on five patterns. These patterns are the most logical sequence of steps to solve specific types of integration problems.

The five patterns are as discussed below:

1. BROADCAST:

Broadcast pattern is act of moving data from one source system to many target systems in a continuous real-time or near-real-time flow. Data flow is usually transactional and one way sync in nature where target system will only receive the data and don’t provide response to the source system. A broadcast pattern should be highly reliable to avoid losing critical data in transit. For example, if any sales happen in the Customer portal, then CRM, Inventory and Analytics applications should be updated in real time. Target systems don’t have to send any response back to the Source system. The broadcast pattern allows for the immediate transfer of customer data between systems, whether from two instances of Salesforce or between Salesforce and other systems.

2. MIGRATION:

Data migration is a data integration pattern that permanently moves a particular set of data from one system to another. Migration pattern is also known as unidirectional migration pattern as it only works for transferring data from source system to target system and not vice-versa. Before data migration occurs, data is accommodated within a source system. The data migration process includes choosing, preparing, extracting, and transforming data. Extract transform load is often associated with the migration data integration pattern. There are numerous Salesforce integration scenarios that may require a migration pattern, including migrating data from a legacy CRM system to Salesforce or from one Salesforce organization to another.

3. BIDIRECTIONAL SYNC:

The Bi-directional sync data integration pattern combines two data sets in two different systems. Bi-directional sync allows two different data sets to exist independently while also acting like one data set. Bi-directional sync data patterns help those companies with multiple systems and business processes occurring simultaneously. This pattern eradicates the load of businesses needing to manually address various inconsistencies in the data. Business processes are optimized by the high data quality and real time data accessibility that bi- directional sync supports.

An example of bi-directional sync could be a Financial Services firm that has different systems for different business processes. Bi-directional sync would update different systems with the same real time data shared. With constant real time data accessibility, the financial services company could keep systems specific for alternative business processes.

4. CORRELATION:

The Correlation data integration pattern identifies the intersection of two data sets and incorporates bi-directional synchronization. First, the correlation data integration pattern identifies where two data sets intersect. Then, bi-directional sync is performed for the module occurring in both systems. Since bi-directional sync pattern is only applied to the relevant intersecting data, Correlation avoids the need for any unwanted data storage This pattern is useful for cases in which two systems want to share data only if they both have records pertaining to the same items. An example of Correlation data integration could be between two different financial services locations. In this situation, correlation data integration allows the separate locations to share their customer data. When the different systems recognize the intersected data between the locations, they can then use bi-directional synchronization. As a result of which both financial services locations are granted real time data access.

5. AGGREGATION:

Aggregation is the simplest way to extract and process data from multiple systems into one application or report in real time. The developers use an integration template built on an aggregation pattern and query multiple systems on demand and merge all data sets to use data however and whenever needed. For example, creating a dashboard that pulls data from multiple Salesforce instances, or updating Salesforce with data from multiple back-end systems, or building APIs that report across multiple systems. There are several factors that affect the integration pattern, and the integration pioneers must choose the right approach to ensure a successful implementation. And, when it comes to integrating with Salesforce, there are several considerations, such as:

Staying within the API limit which shouldn’t exceed 15000 API calls/day
Understanding if the solution requires migration of data into Salesforce or data virtualization
Is the integration business critical and does the response need to be processed in real time or near real time?
Is the size of the payload small or large?
What if the external system is down and the guaranteed delivery needed
The possibility to check if remote systems follow Salesforce Contract
Declarative as to if we want to integrate without writing any code in Salesforce or how

MuleSoft Connectors for Salesforce

MuleSoft Salesforce Connector accelerates your Salesforce integrations across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce Platform. It gives access to all Salesforce entities to business process automation to maximize investments in services and solutions, increasing revenue, and serving your customers better. The MuleSoft connectors that are available today for integrating with Salesforce:

Salesforce (Core) Connector
Salesforce Einstein Analytics Connector
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connector
Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C Data Connector and
Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C

MuleSoft Accelerators for Salesforce clouds

MuleSoft Accelerators enable businesses to implement critical integration use cases for Salesforce clouds, faster and easier than ever before. These solutions include production-ready APIs, connectors, and integration templates that unlock critical data from external systems The following accelerators are built for the Salesforce clouds:

MuleSoft Accelerator for Salesforce Service cloud
MuleSoft Accelerator for B2C Commerce cloud

THE FINAL WORD

Salesforce integration using MuleSoft establishes an IT architecture beyond systems, which enables successful achievement of business goals in a shorter payback period. Salesforce integration allows developers to enhance the functionality of Salesforce and help users save their time and efforts in using tools pertaining to different platforms. Many businesses have found great reliance in the Salesforce solution because of their ability to bring their other systems in unison.

Streamlining Sap S/4hana Migration With Selective Data Transition

kornwill — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 03:33:55 +0000

Today, with the acceleration of digital adoption among industries, the journey towards Intelligent Enterprise can be complex. Ideally, this begins with establishing an intelligent core like SAP ERP. However, even migrating to a new system is more than just a simple upgrade for many companies. With several years of historical business data across complex system landscapes, companies will have to adopt a specific migration approach to SAP S/4HANA. When a migration approach is well-defined it will help businesses ensure business continuity, embrace innovation, and stay pertinent and competitive.

In this article we will look at SAP S/4HANA Selective Data Transition Engagement and how this approach helps in accelerating the SAP S/4HANA Migration.

There are typically two popular methods to manage SAP S/4HANA migration.

GREENFIELD MIGRATION

Greenfield strategy (New Implementation) refers to the migration technique where everything is made from scratch – data, operating systems, applications – and then moved to the new infrastructure. This approach follows a complete re-engineering. The benefit of Greenfield is that its Customizable, Scalable, Compatible, Innovative and Optimized.

However, the limitation of this approach is that you cannot migrate your historical data and thus cannot take the full advantage of any latest intelligent features you need for your business’s historical data to work with which in turn involves a steep learning curve leading the actual migration if not after to be comparatively costly.

BROWNFIELD MIGRATION

In the Brownfield strategy (System Conversion), many of the functions of the previous application are retained, especially the ones that are hard to recreate. Many of the proprietary systems and critical data and information are also retained in the on-premises infrastructure.

The benefit of Brownfield is that its more Familiar, Affordable and Simple as it allows migrating high volumes of historical data.

However, the migration will face some obstacles and may not move ahead as intended when there are few limitations in the original infrastructure. Also, moving a large amount of historical data means we could be left with more and irrelevant data in the newly configured system that could be non-pliable with the data privacy laws.

As both these methods offer certain limitations, SAP produced a brand-new approach, the SAP S/4HANA Selective Data Transition Engagement, that helps with your data migration to SAP S/4HANA a lot convenient.

What is a Selective Data Transition?

A Selective Data Transition (also known as Hybrid Approach or Landscape Transformation) allows to consolidate several ERP systems to one central SAP S/4HANA system. It is an alternative to the New Implementation approach (Greenfield) or System Conversion approach (Brownfield).

With a Selective Data Transition, you can control which data and modules flow together.

Like an inland river delta flowing into the ocean, you migrate only a relevant selection of your current ERP data to SAP S/4HANA.

Business Benefits of Selective Data Transition Approach

Selective data transition abstains from business interference during the moving process to SAP S/4HANA and enables to go live according to your business needs. In general, this approach allows for a single go-live, moving several organizational units or roll-out in multiple phases, for example, by country.
This approach allows you to migrate only your relevant historical data and maintain a consistent process chain while leaving behind outdated data, for example, obsolete corporate codes.
Selective data transition helps you define your speed and combine single projects such as a new go-live implementation, finance management, etc. While moving to SAP S/4HANA in a single step or phased approach.
With SAP S/4 HANA, you can introduce new business processes and yet manage your historical data while safeguarding best practices and previous investments like custom applications.
The near-zero downtime approach restricts the technical downtime to just about a few hours.
Selective data transition can also help change your landscape by either splitting or consolidating existing systems.

Selective Data Transition Engagement is a great way to balance between redesign and reuse. It works across different scenarios for firms of diverse sizes to support a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA. This approach provides a suitable IT landscape for every company’s unique needs. Selective data transition offers several choices for the clients to choose from based on their existing landscapes and future requirements that goes beyond just the standard implementation.

With this approach, companies can also take advantage of select upheaval and modify their business processes to facilitate the use of the latest tools and functionality without having to start from nothing. Companies with more advanced SAP landscapes can clean up their environments while retaining those investments that matter most and reduce their transitions by skirting preparedness projects.

Selective data transition can even help split some of your projects between the cloud and on-premises. It is also a great way to restructure and consolidate your environments as you want.

But, most importantly, this approach helps you save time by combining all tasks in just one step.