There’s a reason the idea of futureproofing a business’ operations has become as much a cue for fear as positivity. Dire visions of a drawn-out, expensive and potentially ruinous modernizing process have deterred more than a few companies in years gone by.

When it comes to futureproofing and digitalization, fear of the unknown is a major roadblock across many lanes: uncertainty surrounding how employees will be affected, a lack of understanding of modern technology, complacency and operational challenges. All may be obvious or inadvertent tethers keeping businesses from reaching their full potential.

Even comprehensive software solutions such as SAP face resistance from companies that cannot advance past the initialization phase. Left to their own devices, such companies simply revert to the status quo rather than embark on a sometimes confusing upgrade mission.

But thanks in part to the work of firms such as MIGNOW, that situation is beginning to change.

“The inspiration behind MIGNOW was the realization that Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing (SAP) migration or upgrades were unnecessarily complex, costly and time-consuming,” says Paulo Secco, CEO and Co-Founder of MIGNOW.

The Sao Paulo firm assists companies in tackling the SAP migration challenge by automating around 80 percent of the process.

For apprehensive companies, MIGNOW’s hands-off approach has been a game changer, just as it was for Secco and Guilherme Joventino, the company’s Co-Founder and COO.

“Our journey began when SAP announced that support for its ERP and Business Suite would end at the end of 2027,” Secco says.

The move meant that companies using SAP would either have to purchase a three-year extended maintenance package or fast-track migration to SAP’s new S/4HANA software.

“We quickly identified a major challenge,” Joventino says. “Imagine 40,000 SAP ECC customers worldwide forced to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA by 2030. You’d have to execute up to 10 go-lives per day, an impossible task to carry out manually.”

Refresher course

The advantages of such an upgrade, however, are clear. SAP S/4HANA is faster and more cost-effective than previous versions of SAP. In its latest iteration, it works well with generative AI. Again, perceived hurdles preceded these innovations.

“Traditional upgrade approaches require long projects with mostly manual efforts,” Secco says. “This leads to high risks and heavy disruptions for businesses.”

Secco and Joventino envisaged an automated, risk-free pathway from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA that would not impact the entirety of a company’s operations. The result was MIGNOW, a Unix-based digital transformation tool that uses AI to create an automated software updater that’s far from a one-shot deal.

Once its creators discovered the extent of AI’s value in the transaction, they quickly changed their understanding of just what MIGNOW could be.

“We’re helping companies futureproof their SAP environments by enabling continuous adaptation, compliance or optimization,” Joventino adds. “Our goal is to ensure that businesses can extract long-term value from their enterprise resource planning software investment.”

Machine learning is helping MIGNOW achieve those aims.

“By opening the door with these innovations, we help our customers improve operations,” Joventino says. “That way, they get the maximum benefits of the technology they’ve paid for.”

Stand-alone solution

It’s a noble cause, but standing in its way was the complexity of the SAP upgrade process.

“It takes a long time. We knew we had to solve that,” Secco says.

Other, similar tools on the market would handle part of the process, but Secco says there was no end-to-end solution for automated, simplified SAP upgrades. Even today, he adds, MIGNOW stands alone in that regard.

“If you’re talking about the full upgrade to the newest version of S/4HANA, we’re the only ones capable of doing that,” he says.

“Some of the other tools add other services, but we’re the only ones 100 percent focused on the conversion and upgrade. We wanted to create a new segment of software with MIGNOW, and that’s what we’ve done.”

Saving time

MIGNOW’s efforts made a splash upon launch in 2019. For many businesses who’d struggled with the SAP upgrade process, MIGNOW heralded a revolution. Today, MIGNOW counts the likes of Nike, Carrefour, Copenhagen Airport and Banco Central de Costa Rica among its clients and is trusted by Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

“Carrefour was a breakthrough project,” Joventino says. “SAP had attempted to move Carrefour to RISE, which is SAP’s own service to migrate businesses to its cloud-based ERP. Instead of charging the client for additional licenses, they completely change the contract by moving to RISE.”

The CIO of Carrefour began to research the possibility of getting the migration completed in its entirety quickly. The result of his search was MIGNOW.

“They approached us in May and wanted to go live in September,” Secco says. “We accepted the challenge.”

Such a tight turnaround was unheard of for a project of that magnitude. Three-and-a-half months later, MIGNOW completed the assignment.

“This was something incredible in the SAP world,” Joventino says. “Nobody had ever done anything like it. It was seen as impossible. Competitors had quoted a timeline of 18 months, and yet we were able to do it in less than four. Completely crazy.”

Sap support

The feat not only saved Carrefour a significant amount of money, it also caught the attention of SAP itself.

“The hardest challenge when you’re pioneering anything new is getting the market to accept it,” Joventino says. “If they’ve never seen it before, they can’t picture how they’ll have to change the way they work to accommodate it. They’re not used to it.

“So every step we take, we have to explain it and prove that it works.”

The hardest audition of all was before an audience of one. Before Carrefour, MIGNOW had attracted a sense of ‘too good to be true’. Afterward, the skepticism started to subside.

“But we had a hard time proving ourselves to SAP, who naturally became interested,” Secco says.

“We did the whole certification process with the SAP build team. Within SAP, there are different layers of partnership, from service to reseller to build, which is reserved for software that complements or can be integrated into SAP. That’s where we are now.”

But to get to that place, SAP required full approval and certification of MIGNOW.

“The approval alone took a year-and-a-half,” he says. “But now SAP can rely on us, and the market trusts us.”

Updating the upgrade

It’s an enviable position that MIGNOW occupies after such a meteoric rise, but Joventino says there’s always another challenge on the horizon.

“We want to add new functionalities or new tools to add value for our customers,” he says. “We’re also constantly providing ongoing analysis and optimization of the platform to ensure maximum efficiency and long-term sustainability. They’re the kind of challenges I like to have.”

For customers looking to adopt this powerful new way of modernizing, Secco says size doesn’t matter.

“If you’re a SAP customer, we can help you. No exceptions. Whether you’re agricultural, manufacturing, utility or whatever number of employees, revenue of any kind. We can handle anything,” he affirms.

And with the SAP ECC cutoff just years away, Secco says now is the time to act.

“We have a new product launching in 2025, Clean Core. It’s designed to simplify our upgrades and the adoption of new tools,” he says.

“What we want is the movement from one version of SAP to another to be smoother than ever. Yes, we have AI under the hood, and AI will drive the future in so many ways. Our motto is ‘keep it simple’ and simply put, we want MIGNOW to be a way to connect two dots.”