Migrating from SAP LO-VC to AVC?
What You Need to Know

As a global leader in enterprise applications, SAP has over half a million customers and nearly 300 million cloud users worldwide. Many of these customers use SAP’s LO-VC module to manage configurations of their products. However, with the support of SAP LO-VC ending in 2027, companies using SAP need to start a migration of their LO-VC models to the new AVC.

In this context, it is important to note that AVC models behave differently than LO-VC models.

For example:

• IF statements in rules have a different semantics than in LO-VC. This means you cannot just migrate a KMAT and be guaranteed that it will work as before.
• Actions are no longer supported.
• Preconditions behave differently.
• If you use the SPECIFIED statement, you may run into problems.

Because of the differences in both syntax and semantics between LO-VC and AVC, SAP customers potentially need to adapt hundreds or thousands of existing models if they want to migrate from LO-VC to AVC.

Hear Jesper illustrate how LO-VC and AVC rules differ and why migrating models requires careful adaptation to ensure consistent behavior in the new AVC environment.

When considering a migration from LO-VC to AVC, there are three options that will make this transition as smooth as possible.

Option 1

Keep LO-VC models in SAP and extract them using Configit’s SAP extractor and consume the models directly from Configit Ace® with the same behavior as in SAP. The advantage of this option is that you can extend the lifetime of the LO-VC models in the migration process and take advantage of Configit Ace® as a SaaS solution for making the models available for any systems anywhere.

Option 2

Keep the structure of the LO-VC models in SAP, migrate the rules into Configit Ace® as a one-off task, and then continue to use Configit Ace® as the modeling environment for these models. The advantage of this approach is that Ace provides a set of unique capabilities for modeling and verification, and a set of high-performance configuration APIs that have been designed for scalability and predictable performance. This option can be used in conjunction with Option 1 by gradually converting more and more LO-VC models to Configit Ace® using Option 2 while extracting the remaining models using Option 1.

Option 3

Extract the AVC models into Configit Ace® on an ongoing basis to benefit from better verification capabilities and faster runtime APIs in Configit Ace®. This option can be combined with Options 1 and 2 to support a gradual, stepwise transition from LO-VC to AVC. The benefit of this option is that it reduces the risk of a long migration project and ensures that configuration models in AVC can be verified for correctness in Configit Ace® and exposed to other systems through open REST APIs

All three options will make the migration process smoother and allow you to approach the migration in smaller steps, gradually moving the models from LO-VC to either Configit Ace® or AVC while having a single system that unifies the data during this migration process.

Jesper explores three effective migration options from LO-VC to AVC with Configit, leveraging our 20+ years of SAP integration expertise for a smoother transition.

Configuration is an inherently difficult problem to solve. Many Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions come with configurators that either have very poor performance, provide inadequate guidance leading to dead ends and inconsistent configurations, or yield suboptimal product variants that don’t offer the full potential of the product.

Many CPQ products also target just one specific channel and cannot be shared to cover different aspects of the configuration of the product. For example, you use one configuration solution for your public website, another for your dealers, and a third solution internally for sales, engineering or manufacturing.

It is very difficult to combine these solutions because you build the rules within each tool, and they don’t offer configuration and pricing as services that can be shared across different solutions and channels. This quickly leads to inconsistencies because the different solutions don’t agree on how a product can be configured from the sales perspective, the engineering perspective, and the manufacturing perspective.

Using a dedicated, shared configuration solution, such as Configit Ace®, allows customers to create product models in a central system that can be shared across their business. Ace captures all aspects of a configurable product – both commercial and technical rules – ensuring that product configurations are always consistent and can be shared efficiently through REST APIs.

Listen to Jesper explain how to seamlessly migrate from LO-VC to AVC with Configit, expose and manage configuration data from both systems on a unified platform during the transition.

When looking for a new configuration solution, we suggest asking yourself the following three questions:

1. Does this configuration system support declarative modeling? Declarative modeling ensures the best performance and scalability, with no dead ends or configuration errors.
2. Does this configuration system have open APIs that allows configuration logic to be shared across the enterprise? This helps prevent over- or under-engineering of products by aligning both technical and commercial perspectives.
3. Can the entire configuration process be performed in a standard, out-of-the-box product? Using standard web applications for both modeling and configuring of the products significantly lowers the risk and reduces the time to value.

At Configit, we often hear from companies about the complexities with variant configuration and the move to AVC. For some, it’s been about handling complex configurations or integrations with CPQ or PLM systems, for others it’s preparing the migration from LO-VC to AVC itself.

Are you considering moving from SAP LO-VC to AVC? Do you also find it challenging, particularly around configurable products?

If this resonates, I’d love to hear about your challenges and learn where the sticking points are for you.

You are welcome to reach out for a chat about your knowledge and experience with SAP which could help me better understand these issues and see where we might be able to assist you with our expertise and solutions for configuration.

As Director of System Architecture and Co-founder of Configit, Jesper Blak Møller is responsible for defining the technical and architectural direction for Configit’s SaaS and on-prem software solutions. A part of Configit’s product leadership team, Jesper has extensive knowledge about rule-based systems, SAP variant configuration, and SAP pricing. In addition to a PhD in computer science, Jesper’s background includes working as a solutions architect in Configit’s professional services department, delivering software solutions integrated to SAP.