PI/PO Migration Part 1: Why Migrate and How to Assess Your Interfaces

📌 KEY POINTS
✅ SAP Integration Suite is SAP's strategic integration platform; PI/PO is in its final maintenance phases.
✅ SAP has announced the end of mainstream maintenance for SAP PO 7.5 at the end of 2027 — verify current dates on SAP's roadmap.
✅ Migration Assessment in Integration Suite analyses PO interfaces and rates their migration complexity.
✅ An inventory with usage, business criticality and owners is the basis for planning waves.
⚠️ Migrating unused or duplicate interfaces wastes a large part of the budget.

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▶ WHERE WE ARE
This series covers moving from PI/PO to Integration Suite. Part 1 is the business case and assessment.

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▶ 1. WHY MIGRATE
SAP Process Orchestration has been the on-premise integration hub for many years. SAP's strategy is Integration Suite on BTP, with Cloud Integration, API Management, Event Mesh and more, and new features and adapters arrive there. With PO 7.5 approaching the end of mainstream maintenance, most customers plan a move rather than staying on an ageing platform.

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▶ 2. TIMELINE THINKING
Large PO landscapes have hundreds or thousands of interfaces. A migration takes time, especially with testing by business owners. Work back from SAP's maintenance dates and your own S/4HANA and cloud roadmaps to decide when waves must finish.

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▶ 3. INVENTORY
List all integrated configurations and other scenarios: sender and receiver systems, adapters, mappings, message volumes, last usage, owners and business criticality. Many PO systems contain interfaces unused for years, which can be retired instead of migrated.

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▶ 4. MIGRATION ASSESSMENT
Integration Suite's Migration Assessment connects to the PO system, extracts interface metadata and evaluates each interface against rules, categorising them by expected effort — ready to migrate, some adjustment, or significant redesign. It produces reports useful for estimates and wave planning.

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▶ 5. BUILDING WAVES
Group interfaces by sender or receiver system, pattern or business process, starting with simpler, lower-risk ones to build skills and templates. Critical interfaces with complex mappings come later, with more testing. Plan coexistence: PO and CPI run in parallel during the programme.

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▶ STEP BY STEP

1. Extract an interface list from PO with volumes and last usage.
2. Mark interfaces unused for 12 months as retirement candidates.
3. Run Migration Assessment on a subset and review categories.
4. Draft the first migration wave.

✅ CHECKPOINT: you have an inventory with retirement candidates, effort categories and a first wave.

A company estimated migrating 900 PO interfaces. Usage analysis showed 280 had not processed messages in over a year and 60 were duplicates. Retiring them before assessment reduced the scope by more than a third and freed budget for testing critical interfaces.

• Migrating unused interfaces.
• No owner for each interface.
• Estimating without assessment data.
• Starting with the most complex interfaces.

• Inventory with usage and owners.
• Retire before migrating.
• Use Migration Assessment for estimates.
• Waves from simple to complex.

Interviewers ask why customers move from PI/PO to Integration Suite, how you assess a PO landscape and how you plan migration waves.