SAP BASIS – SAP ECC Unicode Migration

About Client

Customer is the one of India’s leading Media Organizations that publishes one of the world’s largest circulated newspaper (more than 2.5 million copies per day), in addition to 40 other publications, FM Radio Stations, Television Channels and a strong Online presence.

SAP was implemented in 1998, the first Media organization in Asia-Pacific to do so.

Business Requirement

The Client was running SAP (core modules and IS-Media) with Oracle on Windows for the past 19 years. They started with SAP version 3.1h non-Unicode and then turned to ECC 6.0 Non-Unicode through periodical upgrade as recommended by SAP.

More recently, the Client decided to move to HANA for which Unicode system is a pre-qualification for HANA upgrade.

CCS Solution

CCS performed an analysis of SAP system to identify Unicode non-compatible custom developed programs.

Team converted all non-compatible programs to be Unicode-compatible.

The complete conversion process was executed on the sandbox and learnings were taken to customize and fine tune conversion process to reduce total downtime of SAP landscape.

CCS team was able to execute the Unicode conversion for SAP as well as all other applications that were integrated with SAP, in all 3 environments – Development, Quality and Production.

Business Benefits

CCS managed the project end-to-end to ensure seamless delivery to client as SAP BASIS, Azure & AWS skills were available under a single service partner.

The conversion to Unicode execution reduced database size by 30%.

The customized process exceeded expectations in reducing the conversion time and brought system back to business well before the estimated downtime.

The SAP landscape was made Unicode compatible to meet the integrated applications.

The conversion ensured complete compliance for HANA Migration.