Eursap's Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Yogi Kalra

Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Yogi Kalra.

This month, we feature Yogi Kalra. Yogi is a highly experienced SAP Data Migration expert, with 28 years of delivering zero risk SAP transformations. Yogi is based in Toronto in Canada and has risen through the SAP industry ranks to be the CEO of his own SAP Data Migration company. 

Thank you, Yogi, for joining us. Let's start, if you don't mind, by giving our readers a little bit of a background on who you are, what you do and the company you work for.

Yes, of course. Thank you for having me. I've been in the SAP world for close to 28 years. I started off on the OTC stream with a project at BASF, a German chemical conglomerate. From there, I rose up and started doing other areas in consulting. I came to Canada about 25 years ago. I've worked in just about all modules in SAP, particularly in the FICO, OTC, and P2P areas. I’ve also done some coding, and during my career, I have written eight books on various SAP domains like SD-LE, FI-CO, ECC to S/4 Transition, Supply Chain and a lot more.

Every time I worked on a project, I used to see there were serious problems with data. They always turned out to be sub-optimal projects when the data wasn't managed well. That observation ultimately led me to develop DataVapte, our flagship product that helps accelerate and mitigate risks in S/4HANA Data Migration. It acts as the "final checkpoint" for your data, enforcing business rules to catch critical errors before they become billion-dollar disasters.

28 years: That's a long time, to be in the SAP world! Can you cast your mind back to the start? When did you first become aware of SAP and how did you get into that space?

Mid 90s was my first exposure to SAP. Interestingly, I started my career with a different ERP: Baan. After a year or two, I transitioned into SAP, joining BASF as a National Sales Manager. That's when we started implementing SAP there. I put one foot in, liked it a lot, learned a lot, and that's how my career started. 

At what point did you recognise that data migration was a serious issue for SAP? Was that when S/4HANA came into play or was it before that?

It was related to Target – the 2nd biggest retailer in the US, after Walmart. They came to Canada in 2012. It was a new country for them, the first time they had come here. It should have been a match made in heaven because they bought an existing company called Zellers, which operated in exactly the same segment as Target and their logo colours were also perfectly matched.  Then they decided to implement SAP—there was only ECC in those days.

It went bad from the start. I had some first-hand experience of that through some folks I knew, and the big cause of their failure was data. For example, their units of measure were all over the place, which completely messed everything up. There was no proper validation, largely because the business wasn't involved; IT did the validation. But you can’t expect IT to know what the address of a "sold-to" party is, for instance, or details like how many days they're supposed to pay a vendor or how many cans make up a case. 

So, when you went into the Target stores, you found that aisle after aisle was totally empty, and other aisles were stocked right up to the ceiling. I started to get very interested. What happened here? As a consumer, I went into the store and wondered, how can this happen with a large company like Target? I started diving a little more into it and realized that they had implemented SAP. Because I was an SAP guy, that got me more interested, and I dug into it. That's when I realized that it wasn't so much the functionality—as it was comparatively a simple retail business vis-a-vis say manufacturing —but it was the data that messed up that entire company.

I began to think that if there's something I can contribute to this, I should. So, we developed our product, DataVapte. We started developing it in 2018, and it is a lot about validation. First, any errors or problems that occur in pre-validation of the data load, are distributed to the business: they correct the problems, not IT. There's a lot of governance and inbuilt checks in the tool. To ensure basic errors like of UoM don’t occur.

Do you see the services you're offering as a product or as a service? We talk about people, process and technology, so are you combining those three together and offering that as a service to the customer?

Yes, we are. We see our core proposition as a product-enabled service, seamlessly combining people, process, and technology. For example, our core proposition is about building a process that truly engages business users. DataVapte introduces workflows that empower business users to take ownership of their data, giving the PMO real-time visibility. Because our tools are designed to solve these fundamental business problems, they can be used not just during a single migration project, but also in a business-as-usual environment. This means a company already on S/4HANA can continue to use our product forever to proactively remove potential data errors.

You must have quite a lot of experience of migration now. Can you talk about some of the common kind of stumbling blocks, common issues that you come across? Maybe some common oversights that customers have when they approach a migration project?

For a long time, companies have left everything up to the systems integrator. But they're not the business; the business needs to be much more involved. Change management is key. The people who are information brokers in a company need to be involved because they know the processes. Another point is to focus on standard implementations without over-customization. Very often, we don't project the right business advantages of staying standard to the customer, and that's a big gap.

SAP is obviously trying very hard to get people to move on to the Public Cloud. Are you seeing more of that in the data space and the data migration space or are customers still wanting to go private or on premise?

The choice between public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise largely comes down to two factors: affordability and complexity. Smaller organizations, especially those without complex manufacturing or plant maintenance requirements, often find public cloud more attractive because it’s cost-effective as they don’t need to hire teams for system maintenance etc. and allows them to leverage standard functionality which is all they need. 

Larger enterprises with more intricate operations typically require the flexibility of private cloud or on-premise models as they have a lot more functionality and they also require large SAP teams which they hire inhouse rather than outsource to SAP.

What we’re seeing in the data migration space is that public cloud adoption creates unique opportunities for DataVapte. As our delivery partners highlight, public cloud projects often run with leaner delivery teams and limited bandwidth for data migration support. This is exactly where DataVapte adds value. By embedding workflows that engage business users in error detection and correction, DataVapte enables organizations to move projects forward faster, with fewer delays and higher data quality.

As always with SAP, the ecosystem changes so quickly so fast. How do you keep on top of it? How do you how do you keep learning? 

It's a huge challenge. Something happened to me recently in Philadelphia when I went to the SAP head office and I sat in one of the Enterprise Architect forums that Paul Kurchina organizes. This February when I was there, I was sitting in one of the sessions where they started talking about BDC – “Business Data Cloud” – and as an old timer, in my mind I am thinking about BDC sessions that you see in the transaction SM35 in SAP which is called Batch Data Communication. So, I wasn’t able to relate what he was saying with what I was thinking...it took me a couple of minutes to register in my mind. That these 2 BDCs were not the same. There is a generational gap between them so to say! SAP is becoming increasingly complex and that's leading to specialisations. You have today a single view that itself is so big that you need to be focused in that one area. I think what I would say is to stay in the field that you are in and grab knowledge of everything that's centred around that field. 

I want to talk very briefly about AI because, you know that you can't have a conversation about any software without mentioning AI. What I wanted to talk about was the AI in the context of data. So, what do you think? What role does data have to play in AI?

Data is the foundation of AI. Without reliable, clean data, even the most advanced AI models will fail. I often use the example of Target Canada—poor data quality played a huge role in sinking their entire expansion. That was an extreme case, but the lesson applies everywhere: in AI-driven business decision-making, garbage in is garbage out.

This is why validation is so critical, especially in SAP data migrations. If you’re pushing inconsistent or incomplete data into an AI system, the insights you get back will be flawed. With solutions like DataVapte, validation ensures the data going into AI-driven processes is accurate, business-ready, and compliant—so companies can trust the outputs and truly benefit from AI.

When you think about data migration, there's extract, transformation, and load. Does Datavapte cover all three of those functions?

Yes, it does. We extract the data from legacy and then the transformation rules kick in. Some of them have been necessitated by S/4HANA because of new functionality, while other rules are based on our customers’ requirements—such as the need for Canadian postal codes to be 7 digits with a space in the middle.

When the transformation happens in the background, it auto-populates the SAP migration cockpit templates. This itself is a huge time saver of over 70-80% as there is no manual effort involved unless one needs to do any heuristic work on the transformed data. Then we pre-validate that data to make it S/4 ready. Whatever errors are found, we distribute them to the business through a detailed workflow – this is another major time saver where one does not have to ‘fish’ around for the errors. We also have field level validation, so if they enter the wrong company code, for example, we tell them it's wrong.

We also have an AI mechanism that can carry out auto-changes based on a machine learning model.

Next, we provide a dashboard that shows the business users the project's status—for instance, that there are 100 templates in the project, 50 are already done, 10 are not done, or that SD templates have 7 completed, FI has 12, and so on. Validation and load reminders are available, so there is a lot of governance around the data migration. This real time visibility is the cornerstone of governance. 

Finally, after the data is loaded, we run a report that compares what was in the template versus what's in S/4HANA and reports any discrepancies. Imagine the peace of mind the client has when they know there has been no stone left unturned in this process of data validation and they can kick the tires confidently. 

Our approach prioritizes business engagement, governance, and AI-enhanced validations to future-proof SAP transformations. Data migration is not just a project phase but an ongoing business process. DataVapte integrates with SAP’s migration cockpit to be a forever tool — enabling organizations to manage data continuously, long after implementation teams have left.

And how can how can our readers find out more? Is there a website to go to?

Yes, there's a website. Datavapte.com or they can simply write to us at info@datavapte.com for a demo.

Once the project's done and the SI has gone home and the business must manage the migration of their own data in the future, there are only two ways of doing it. One is that either you go screen by screen on a material master and fill in data in those countless different screens. Or you use the migration cockpit. And because DataVapte works with migration cockpit, it is a forever tool. It's not a tool, whose usage will end when the project ends. So even if they are already running S/4, they can still make their life easy by using DataVapte. 

I have one last question for you, which we always ask our gurus and that's if you think about an ECC 6 consultant that has only ever worked on ECC, with no exposure to S/4HANA – or a new consultant coming into the market now – what advice do you have to those to those guys to future proof them for the next generation to come in SAP?

Think of the business process and you will never go wrong. Whether it's ECC or S/4HANA, so long as you have the process clear in your head, you will be able to figure out the solution. Secondly, SAP is logical. Think of it as a very large Excel spreadsheet. It's a packaged software, so if you know your business process, it's not going to be very difficult to learn. I think of everything in SAP as a place holder – if A, B and D come together, the result is T, if B and F come together, result is C and so on. Work with that basic assumption and build up from there always keeping the process in mind. A lot has changed, and yet nothing has changed because the basic requirements will always remain the same. Whether you are a $100K company or a $100Bn company in the same line of work, we still must do all the same activities.