Eursap's Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Mark Antony Kirkup

Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Mark Antony Kirkup.

This month, we feature Mark Antony Kirkup. Mark is a real guru, having nearly thirty years experience in the SAP space, focusing mainly on data migration. His expertise covers all the latest technologies in data migration and he has handled data in some of the most complex and challenging functions in the ecosystem. This is a rare opportunity to hear from a real thought leader.

Mark, thanks so much for talking to us. You’ve had a rich journey through the SAP landscape—how did you first get started in the world of SAP, and what drew you into it?

I first got involved in SAP Projects when I was 19 years old at Coats PLC who are a global leader in the Sewing Threads & Zip Fasteners Apparel Industry.  They chose SAP R/3 for their Global ERP System and I was invited onto the project as the Production Planning SME for their Zip Fastener business.  Initially I started as a junior project member doing system testing but quickly became a much larger part of the project doing data migration and expanding my SME duties for Materials Management and Sales & Distribution and leading the Data Migration area for all Data Objects within the Zip Fastener plants.

From your time working on ECC6 to now with S/4HANA and beyond, how has the SAP consulting world evolved?

I would say that the consulting world has evolved the most in adaptation to change and particularly now that S/4HANA is the norm.  The consultants that have stayed ahead with developing their skills and training are the ones that are finding the best roles and are constantly head hunted for new projects.  I have several friends and colleagues who have not kept up to date with the changes and are now struggling to find good roles.  

Looking back over your career, is there one career decision you think you made that you feel really paid off? And maybe one you’d approach differently in hindsight?

The decision I made that paid off was to take the opportunity to get involved in the initial SAP Project, which involved moving to London for around 18 months away from my family and friends and while it was quite a big sacrifice to dedicate myself completely to my work at such a young age, this springboarded my career to where I am today.  

The only thing I would say I would have changed in hindsight is working as an independent consultant earlier.  I always knew I had excellent skills, but I struggled with the confidence I needed to go out on my own until 2015.  This was largely due to my Project Director Bob Chahil telling me I was the best SAP Consultant he had ever worked with and that gave me the confidence finally to take the leap and I’ve gone from strength to strength since then.

You've worked across multiple industries—do you find any particular sector more challenging or rewarding when it comes to SAP data migration?

Every industry has its own complexities of course but from all of the industries I’ve worked in the Automotive Electronics Industry is by far the most complex and especially in the manufacturing area where bills of materials are multi BOM structured with thousands of components which are allocated to routing operations and part placement positions.  I also find that the most complex scenarios are the ones that are the most rewarding when you come up with solutions whether that is in data or in the functional areas I support.

You clearly have a strong grasp on all things data migration in the world of SAP —now we are firmly in the S/4HANA world, what challenges face clients when it comes to moving data to S/4HANA, which perhaps were not so much of an issue for ECC6?

Two complex areas I see on every project is in the Customer and Vendor transition to Business Partners and the complexity of consolidating them and the Tax Category assignment rules which are quite complex.  Whist the BP-CVI tools are good, I prefer not to use them unless consolidation is done in the prior system because there is always a large deduplication task to consider.  Businesses neglect the deduplication and prefer to deal with it during the transition to S/4HANA.    

The Business Partner Tax Categories also do not follow the same roles for all countries so for example in most countries the tax category for VAT would be the country code concatenated with “0” for example “GB0” or “DE0” but this does not apply to all, and this is just one example.  In previous projects I’ve created custom conversion programs in the legacy system which outputs the tax category required for S/4HANA.

The same problem exists when migrating to S/4HANA from a non-SAP Legacy System as the tax categories are a new concept and the effort required to transform the tax numbers without a custom program in ECC6 or from a non-SAP Legacy System is very time consuming and is never considered in the project timeline.  This is another reason I like to migrate 100% data from Mock1 to alert the business to this problem early in the process so they can start working on the transformation process, which is almost impossible to do systematically without custom programs in ECC6.  

It is also very typical that the S/4HANA project is involving many SAP and non-SAP systems going into a single S/4HANA instance so deduplication and handling the tax category issues are a bigger issue than when migrating from a single instance of ECC6 and these two areas are always overlooked, whereas the changes in the financials and other areas are deeply considered.

What’s one part of an SAP transformation that often gets overlooked but can make or break a project?

Without question this is ALWAYS the data migration area and at least 80% of the projects I get involved with is to come in and fix the data migration issues in order to get the project back on track.  

I would also say that to get data migration right my strategy is to always start the first Mock Load with 100% of the source data.  Whilst this requires more effort at the start, it also throws out all the issues from Day 1 so that the project team can start working on them immediately which means that by Mock 3 there should be almost no data defects left to handle and go-live is almost defect free.
 
Because I also have decades of functional experience as well as data migration, by the time Mock 3 comes the data is almost perfect so I get involved in the more complex functional area problems, for example in one project I developed a last minute custom program to handle a supplier consignment process with invoices rather than self bill (the only solution offered by SAP) and in another project I developed a last minute quality results transformation database which the 100 strong project team had worked on for 2 years prior to my arrival and deemed it an impossible task and I was able to develop this in under two weeks with only one other person assisting me.

How important do you think it is to have business knowledge, to be able to carry out data migration effectively?

I believe it is extremely beneficial to have business knowledge my pre-SAP background is in production planning and procurement, and I also have decades of SAP Functional experience supporting day to day business issues and project improvements.  This allows me to understand my data objects at field level and the implications of a wrong setting, which allows me to guide the business to know where problems will arise ahead of time, and I can set up demos to show the differences and their implications.

Data governance and AI-ready data are increasingly front and centre of organization’s data strategies —where do you see master data heading in the next few years?

This is an interesting question and data governance is definitely something that is becoming ever important within organizations and almost every organization on SAP S/4HANA are using an MDG system for their Financials, Business Partners and Material Masters, but many are already using an MDG system for other objects like Assets and Project Management, albeit SAP Standard MDG does not cater for so these have to be implemented with custom developments or additional applications.

I foresee AI being a powerful tool within the next 5 years so that things like Supplier and Customer Master Data can be cross checked against recognised standardised data like Dunn & Bradstreet and Manufacturing Part Number information could be retrieved from supplier systems which will lead to more accurate data than ever.  

With the 2027 S/4HANA deadline approaching, how do you see the pace of migrations shaping up over the next two years? And how will the 2033 RISE Transition model change this?

The pace of S/4HANA migrations is already rapidly ramping up but some businesses are choosing to hold back on the upgrade due to the large costs and although SAP have extended support of ECC6 beyond 2027, the cost of this will be at a premium.  

I foresee the companies who held back with the move to S/4HANA saving a considerable amount of money on consultant fees after 2030 because supply will far outweigh demand which of course will drive the fees down.

The 2033 RISE offering forces businesses to move onto SAP HANA DB as part of their offering but the businesses I work with who aren’t on S/4HANA yet are already on SAP HANA DB which will make the full journey to S/4HANA smoother.

What’s your take on SAP’s focus on cloud and RISE with SAP—genuine transformation or just new packaging?

SAP’s shift to the cloud, especially with RISE with SAP is a push towards modernizing systems.  Legacy systems like SAP ECC6 are too rigid where cloud solutions offer scalability, lower infrastructure costs, and quicker innovation cycles through continuous updates.

I still foresee the bigger businesses remaining on-premise but for businesses without considerable complexity and are happy to use industry standard solutions I see the cloud solutions as a better fit for a lower cost.

As a seasoned SAP contractor, how are you finding the current market? Is it warming up, cooling off, or just weird right now?

The market is always quiet from January to March, but this year does feel a little strange as a few clients I’ve talked with are having issues with budget release and are looking to reduce the costs for consultants.  We will soon reach a point where there are not enough projects for consultants, so I’d expect this to drive down the rates offered for independent consultants.  This is also likely one of the factors in businesses holding back on moving to S/4HANA while getting the HANA DB.

Have you seen client expectations shift for contractors over the years—more hybrid work, shorter projects, or more involvement in strategy?

When I started working on projects, they were exclusively 100% on-site and this slowly evolved to around 50/50 Hybrid roles.  The covid situation forced businesses to reevaluate their project strategies and I’ve worked 100% remotely in the past 5 years.  Whilst I am prepared to travel for critical parts of the project, it simply hasn’t been necessary because the clients have been so happy with my remote delivery, they decided that there would be no additional benefit for me to be on-site, which of course saves them money.

If SAP had an "Easter egg" feature that nobody really used but you secretly loved, what would it be? (Or... what would you add if you could?)

One thing I can think of here is MRP Profiles.  No company I’ve worked for has ever used these until I have been involved and even the consultants don’t push for them to use them.  I personally like to categorise different types of materials into MRP Profiles so you can standardise a lot of the MRP settings for that group of materials and standardise the way they’re managed and controlled.  You can also then use the same settings group wise to make sure that different plants are adhering to the same rule sets, albeit the settings for one plant might slightly differ to another depending on their local supply chain.

Another thing I would add is the use of tools like Precisely and Magnitude offerings that allow non technical users to do mass update jobs similar to LSMW programs with very little complexity.

I would also encourage SAP to make the Data Migration Cockpit more useful by creating more standard programs using BAPI/FMs that can create, maintain and delete data as well as performing mass transactions where standard SAP does not have a solution for.  For example on one of my projects the quality of data for business partners was poor from the legacy system and the other companies already using S/4HANA had poor quality data as well so the business had to work on updating the quality of data and I created custom data migration cockpit programs using SAP BAPIs to perform the updates and in this case there was no SAP MDG in scope and LSMW update programs for Customers and Suppliers no longer work due to the new BP structure.

What about outside of work Mark? Do you have any hobbies and interests?

I get up at 5am every workday to get to the gym for 6am to do an hours weight training and 30 minutes cardio before I start work.

I’ve also practiced Martial Arts for most of my life and I’m a Black Belt in Modern Street Combat and feature in and on the front cover of a book called “Fight to Win” by Martin Dougherty. 

And the question we always like to ask our experts…if you had any advice for new SAP consultants, or perhaps ECC6 consultants, what would it be?

My most important advice would be “Continuously Develop” and that doesn’t need to be official SAP Courses which can be expensive as you can learn a lot from SAP Press books and I personally find Udemy an invaluable learning tool for any subject, especially SAP related topics.