Even though SAP continues highlighting the benefits of transitioning from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, many organizations remain on their (increasingly) aging ECC solutions. However, with the 2027 end of mainstream ECC support, it will soon be impossible to put off big decisions in this area. All SAP customers still on ECC now face a decision: Should they move to SAP S/4HANA, and if so, how? ERP re-implementation or complete upgrade?

Staying with older SAP solutions will drive up costs and make it difficult for organizations to retain skilled resources. People either get frustrated by the limitations of older solutions or move to companies where there are opportunities for personal development through newer business solutions and updated technology.

For most organizations, the challenge will be how to realize this shift from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA. Executives will need to understand the reality and challenges involved in such large-scale organizational change. Assessing a company's options, building a business case for change and early preparation work will all become critical first steps toward whole-scale change.

I've been involved in projects, from early adopters of SAP S/4HANA to current clients just embarking on this journey, and I have picked up many insights along the way. I've written this two-part blog series to help you decide how to approach the move. In part one (this blog), I will recap some of the core options, including my advice on one absolute must-get right. The second blog explores the realities of the actual move, providing my top ten considerations for a successful move to SAP S/4HANA.It’s more complex, quick or cheap to move to SAP S/4HANA – so why do it?

While many companies have transitioned to SAP S/4HANA, a substantial proportion still needs to take the plunge. While some organizations plan to take up the option for extended support to 2030 (all at a premium), others need help with the SAP S/4HANA business case. Many – if not a majority – seem willing to stay with a proven and stable ECC ERP and not take on the effort or risk of a move to SAP S/4HANA. However, while these organizations may view their current SAP ECC solution as stable, known and resilient, the risks increase over time that the older ECC solution will not meet future business requirements, new technologies or support improved business efficiencies and growth.

There are, after all, many business and technical reasons for moving to SAP’s more comprehensive range of newer SaaS products, services and solutions. Ultimately, SAP's investment and innovation are focused on SAP S/4HANA. The ability to support a company's business needs will lead to increasing technical debt and an ever-growing challenge when it eventually becomes a compelling event to move off SAP ECC. For example, SAP drives efficiencies via process simplifications, lighthouse App solutions, GenAI and improved entry and processing intelligence. Staying on SAP ECC can cut your company off from these. We are already seeing this with Joule as it starts to be delivered beyond just SuccessFactors.

Many of SAP’s innovations provide business users with automation, intelligence, efficient user experience and accurate insights into business processes. Accessing these will only come from the step change into SAP’s new SAP S/4HANA landscape. Thus, achieving the flexibility needed to meet new business requirements will only come from these new landscapes. To help incentivize adoption, RISE with SAP provides a single contract and an attractive business solution, enabling a shift to a more OpEx model and cloud-enabled SaaS solution.

It's important to note that the SAP journey must be considered part of a broader business transformation, not just in isolation. These transformations are then facilitated by system updates and new layered approaches for delivering solutions (i.e., layers for innovation, differentiation and systems of record). These layers maximize the use of cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS) or Complementary off-the-shelf (COTS) business solutions and fit into broader corporate landscapes or architectural preferences with technical platforms and tools.

Beware the pitfall of underestimation when building your case for change

A wealth of public information is now available to help build the case for change. SAP and system integrators such as HCLTech provide assessment, business case and roadmap services. Due to the scale of demand, many now offer this as a pre-packaged or tool-based service. Yet very large or highly customized landscapes will likely need more in-depth assessment and review.

Be mindful that even when a complete business case for change is understood, companies must pay more attention to the task ahead regarding time, resources and organizational change. This underestimation frequently starts when building up the business case. It continues by agreeing on the strategic approach, defining an architectural vision, assessing options, selecting partners and getting to the starting point of any project. I've seen organizations establish a budget for change and then immediately start to eat into the budget and timescales during the early business case, partner selection and establishment of the project team (as they underestimate even these first steps).

While these first steps are challenging, the discovery and design stages also bring plenty of opportunities for projects to lose momentum and need help to close out these key phases to time or budget. I advise you to plan out and correctly estimate the work ahead as it is straightforward to underestimate, under resource or ineffectively plan for even the very first stages in your journey.

Gaining an in-depth understanding of your business and technical landscape – and how this should be realized within a new SAP S/4HANA core – is a large and complex task. Your business and technical resources will be crucial in this journey, as they will know your business context and the associated systems landscape. Give them time to understand SAP and any supporting SaaS or COTS solutions and assess and ultimately approve a target design. Ensure your team is early on a natural working SAP S/4HANA system to assess SAP's supplied best practices in operation and to bring to life new solutions and opportunities.

Finally, it's worth remembering that demand for such skilled and experienced people will continue to grow in the marketplace. If you leave your current team on older solutions for too long, you may soon face an increased challenge in finding and retaining your key people.

In the next few years, all companies still on ECC will have to make this case for change. Leaving this for a few more years or deflecting it as someone else's problem is no longer an option. Executives and companies will very soon be forced to have longer-term plans and take shorter-term actions for this journey.

How do you approach moving to SAP S/4HANA, and what options do you have?

Again, the options for getting to SAP S/4HANA (or other newer dimension SAP solutions such as Ariba, Concur, SuccessFactors, HXM and SAP Commerce Cloud) are also well established, if manageable. Variations from a simple Brownfield upgrade to Greenfield re-implementation have been supplemented by various options (often termed Bluefield) that can merge some aspects of both. This generally means taking a core system and upgrading it, but selectively transferring over the data after a re-configuration phase and re-factoring or re-platforming some of the bespoke solutions into side-by-side solutions to maintain that clean core.

Yet if the above is known, why is this not enough information for companies wrestling with their decision about whether to migrate to updated SAP platforms?

The simple answer is that for many companies, the scale of the existing SAP solution – often a highly customized and tightly coupled solution into the overall corporate business and technical landscape – is a huge challenge to take on. While parts of the strategy and journey may be available, realizing this within a specific company can be challenging. Additionally, previous journeys onto the SAP platform (possibly from 10, 20 or 30 years ago) have often consumed large budgets many years and left many business and IT professionals with experiences they do not want to repeat.

Rest assured that today's SAP journey differs from what it was even just five years ago, so do not be put off. Many companies have gone through this journey and the "first adopter" days are long gone. Most routes to SAP S/4HANA are well-trod, i.e., today's Blue, Green and Brownfield options. Many methods, strategies, tools and ways exist to assist companies going down this route. Indeed, I suspect the challenge ahead may be one of limited capacity in the market rather than a lack of mature tools, methods or options.

What are the most practical steps forward?

There are many steps companies can take to prepare for the journey ahead. I’ve summarized these in the key points below – and explore the actual realities of a move in the second blog in this series:

• Understand your current business solutions, application scope and strategic objectives
• Build your specific business case with a clear view of the company’s scope, business objectives and potential delivery or realization phasing over time.
• Identify broader early tasks, already within the company's control, to prepare for the journey ahead. For example, standardizing tools, platforms or solutions can help address data quality and control continued technical debt (managing new or re-worked in-app or tightly coupled developments).

The most significant topic for discussion will be how to move to SAP S/4HANA, with a critical question being if a Greenfield re-implementation is feasible. The original implementations took years for many large corporate landscapes, possibly spanning a multi-year template roll-out across differing geographies and business units. Equally, an upgrade may take time to realize and it may be hard to adopt best practice processes following a shift back to more standardized SAP. Any solution also has the risk of a single upgrade or implementation across the entire business landscape.

Understand that there are ways to address the above issues, yet this does give an early insight into how challenging these core strategic topics can be to address and the level of impact these topics can have on both the implementation and the future solution. To address these issues, there are assessment, roadmap and discovery services and methodologies that both SAP recommends and that most implementors offer.

Experience in specific industry solutions, large corporate landscapes and heavily customized historic SAP platforms are topics that require the highest level of specialized input to explore the best method of moving from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA. If this characterizes your organization, it will be critical for you to engage with a partner like HCLTech early in these initial stages so your teams understand SAP's new functional opportunities and the technicalities of how these can be realized.

Indeed, we can help support companies with access to best practice SAP systems, with industry solutions and a supporting Business Transformation Platform in a physical or virtual labs environment. If you are specifically interested in some of the typical challenges and opportunities around SAP-focused landscapes and transitioning to an updated landscape, please check out my other blogs.