How the Post Office finally moved off a 19-year-old SAP HR system

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The Post Office was forced to move to SuccessFactors this year after support for its 19-year-old SAP system was stopped

The Post Office has recently completed a migration from a 19-year-old SAP HR 4.7 system to SuccessFactors, saving the company money, giving employees the ability to self serve and decommissioning a whole range of manual processes for the HR department.

Speaking during the UK and Ireland SAP User Group conference in Birmingham last week Samantha Winstanley, SuccessFactors product manager at the Post Office, talked through the migration, including some key lessons learned along the way.

In 2016 the Post Office was made aware that its 19-year-old R/3 4.7 instance would no longer be supported. "We had no option but to move forward," Winstanley said.

For those that are new to the SAP product line: R/3 is the ERP predecessor to SAP ERP (ECC), which has now been superseded by S/4HANA.

With that motivation to move, the organisation embarked on a procurement process for new HR software, but ended up opting for a vendor it knew well in SAP by going with SuccessFactors, the cloud-based human capital management (HCM) vendor it acquired in 2011.

As can be expected that 19-year-old system was "starting to creak". The organisation was running eight modules for things like learning, performance and application tracking, all of which were "outdated and not linked," she added.