Build Your S/4HANA Migration Plan

Turn complexity into clarity to make informed S/4HANA migration decisions.

Analyst Perspective

S/4HANA migration is a system of decisions, not a sequence.

With SAP's end of mainstream maintenance for ECC approaching at the end of 2027, S/4HANA migration is no longer a question of if, it's a question of how, and how well. The technical work can be outsourced. The decisions that shape it cannot.

What makes this uniquely difficult is that no migration decision stands alone. Deployment model, migration approach, strategic intent, technical complexity and organizational capacity – each choice and reality changes the constraints on the others. Failure is not obvious; it evolves as the project drifts from the plan. Timelines stretch, budgets grow, and the original ambition quietly shrinks into something easier to deliver. This rarely happens because execution was poor. It happens because decisions were made in isolation, without anyone ever pressure-testing the whole path.

There is no "perfect" migration plan, only the one that fits your intent and organization. Your implementation partner brings technical skill and delivery experience, but they do not know your organization, your culture, or what success looks like in your context. That knowledge is yours.

This blueprint provides a structured approach to help you walk into the implementation partner conversation knowing what you want, understanding how your decisions connect, and ready to own the outcome, because long after the partner has moved on, you will be the one living with the choices that are made.

Mia Scherba
Research Analyst, Data & Applications
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

• ECC's end of maintenance is fast approaching, and organizations that plan to migrate must act now. S/4HANA implementations are multiyear transformations; every delay increases timeline pressure, cost, and delivery risk.
• Many organizations lack experienced internal personnel to lead an S/4HANA migration. Between that and the project's size and complexity, many organizations do not know where to begin with decision-making.
• Implementation partners enable your technical execution, but they cannot define what success looks like for your organization. The knowledge of your people, processes, and priorities resides internally and must guide the migration.

Common Obstacles

• Oversimplifying the Migration
  Moving to another SAP product creates the illusion that migration will be simple. Underestimating transformation impact leads to insufficient remediation of data, processes, customizations, and integrations, increasing risk to timelines and go-live success.
• Process Change Resistance
  Organizations prioritize technical execution and underestimate the change management required to drive adoption of new processes across the organization.
• Over-Reliance on Implementation Partners
  The volume and complexity of decisions cause organizations to struggle to distinguish which decisions they own, leading them to defer critical choices.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Understand Your Current System
  Assess both your current ECC technical complexity and your organization's readiness for change to guide your migration plan.
• Define Your Migration Intent
  Establish the "why" behind your migration. Use this moment intentionally to define what kind of organization you want to be after the migration.
• Evaluate Trade-Offs and Choose Your Plan
  Assess your migration path holistically to understand the trade-offs that are inherent in your selection. Identify which decision combinations are aligned with one another or are invalid combinations. Choose a path aligned to your intent, complexity, and priorities.

Info-Tech Insight

There is no single "right" path to migrate to S/4HANA, but there is a wrong one: migrating without understanding the trade-offs. The organizations that succeed are the ones who knew the price before they paid it.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organizations define a clear and effective S/4HANA migration plan.

• SAP's ECC end of mainstream maintenance is fast approaching, with support ending in 2027 and limited extended support available until 2030. To address this reality, your organization has committed to moving its ERP to S/4HANA.
• S/4HANA migrations are large-scale, complex transformations whose requirements and implications are often not fully understood.
• They span multiple years, require significant financial investment, and impact critical business processes across the organization. Any missteps in this project can have substantial consequences for your organization and its operations.
• A technical implementation partner is essential to execute the migration. However, they do not have the expertise to be the strategic decision-maker; that role belongs to your organization. You must define your own direction, shaping the target state, priorities, and trade-offs, because you will ultimately own the outcomes and must live with the long-term implications.

To successfully migrate from ECC to S/4HANA, you must proactively direct your migration by understanding the full journey and making the critical strategic decisions that determine your path forward.

65% of current ECC users are still not fully migrated to S/4HANA.

Source: Precisely, 2026

92% of users who have migrated to S/4HANA exceeded their timeline expectations.

Source: CIO.com, 2025

Common obstacles

These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

• Underestimating an S/4HANA migration as a technical system upgrade rather than a full ERP transformation that widens the scope of considerations.
• A lack of internal personnel experienced in S/4HANA migrations to understand the interdependencies between critical migration decisions.
• Failing to complete a comprehensive current-state assessment to understand the level of effort required to remediate and transition data, processes, customizations, and integrations.
• Over-relying on implementation partners to define scope and make critical decisions, despite inherent biases toward their own methodologies, tools, and vendor ecosystems.
• Underestimating the scale of change management required across the organization to drive adoption of the new platform.

55% of organizations state that implementation was more complex/time-consuming than expected.

Source: ASUG, 2025

49% of total S/4HANA go-live costs are attributed to implementation partners.

Source: ASUG, 2025

What is SAP S/4HANA?

SAP S/4HANA is SAP's flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

The software ties together all the different functions of the business into one unified system with a shared database so everyone is working from the same data in real time. S/4HANA is the current generation of SAP's ERP, built on SAP's own in-memory database called HANA, which makes it much faster than older versions.

Source: SAP Press, n.d.

CORE MODULES:

Finance (FI)

Manages financial reporting, accounting, and compliance, providing a real-time, unified view of financial data through the Universal Journal.

Controlling (CO)

Supports internal cost planning, reporting, and monitoring to help management make informed decisions about profitability and performance.

Materials Management (MM)

Handles procurement, inventory management, and warehousing, including vendor evaluation, invoice verification, and material valuation.

Sales & Distribution (SD)

Manages the order-to-cash process, including sales order processing, pricing, shipping, billing, and customer service.

Production Planning (PP)

Facilitates the planning, scheduling, and execution of manufacturing processes.

Human Capital Management (HCM)

Covers personnel administration, talent management, payroll, time management, and training.

Understand the key features of S/4HANA

Unified Data Model

All business data lives in one simplified structure, eliminating the duplicated and fragmented tables that made ECC slow, complex and difficult to report from.

Modern User Experience

SAP's old transaction-based interface is replaced with a clean, role-based design (Fiori) that works on any device and shows people only what they need to do their job.

Integration with AI

S/4HANA is built to connect directly with SAP's AI tools so intelligent automation and predictions run inside your business processes, not as a separate system bolted on afterward.

Integrated Business Processes

Financial and operational planning happens on the same live data as day-to-day transactions, so there is no longer a gap between what the plan says and what the system reflects.

Embedded Analytics

Reports and dashboards run directly against live transactional data in real time, eliminating overnight data extracts, separate reporting systems, and waiting until the data warehouse catches up.

Source: ASUG, 2024

S/4HANA has significant capability differences compared to ECC

Understanding the key differences between the two ERPs is essential to planning a smart migration and unlocking the capabilities that drive real value.

Migrating to S/4HANA is as complex as choosing a new ERP system

• A common misconception about S/4HANA migrations is that it is a technical upgrade, simply moving from one SAP product to another. However, it is vastly different.
• An S/4HANA migration is a completely new replatforming that requires defining new ways of working, cleansing data, and running effective change management in your organization.

This is as complex as choosing an entirely new ERP outside of SAP, which is a completely viable option.

For this research, however, we focus exclusively on migrating from ECC to S/4HANA.

Additional Info-Tech resources for ERP selection

Get the Most Out of Your ERP

Select an Enterprise Application

Info-Tech's methodology for building your S/4HANA migration plan

Insight summary

There is no perfect migration plan
There is no single "right" plan for S/4HANA migrations, but there is a wrong one: migrating without understanding the trade-offs. Success comes from making deliberate decisions and owning their long-term implications.

Do not underestimate the scope
S/4HANA migrations are commonly underestimated as system upgrades, but they carry the complexity of full ERP transformation. Organizations that succeed first establish an understanding of where they are and where they want to go, enabling informed decisions and reducing the risk of common migration failures.

Decisions cannot be made in isolation
The critical S/4HANA migration decisions are deeply interconnected – optimizing for one often introduces constraints on another. Look at the migration plan holistically and balance what you are giving up and what value you are gaining.

You don't have to do everything, but you must lead it
You will not be able to complete your migration alone. External partners support your technical delivery, but you must retain control of the path forward. Your role is not to execute every detail but to provide direction, maintain alignment, and ensure the migration stays anchored to your objectives.

Ambition must match capacity
Perfect technical execution alone does not deliver value – adoption does. Without organizational buy-in, even the best technical migrations fail to deliver impact. Align your ambitions to your organization's readiness for change or invest in building that readiness.

Costs aren't eliminated, they're deferred
What you do not remediate in your current landscape does not disappear, it is simply deferred. These costs will resurface as implementation delays or higher long-term operating costs. It is a choice to address them up-front or prepare to absorb them later.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

S/4HANA Project Management Worksheet

Document your project management team and governance processes to guide your migration plan.

S/4HANA Complexity Assessment

Leverage this tool to assess and understand your current technical ERP complexity.

S/4HANA Decision Guide

Leverage Info-Tech's decision template to assess the trade-offs and benefits of each migration plan.

Key deliverable:

S/4HANA Migration Readiness Brief

A customizable presentation that clearly communicates your migration goals to your implementation partner.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Leverage this blueprint's methodology and tools to define your migration intent, make informed trade-offs, and build an S/4HANA plan that aligns to your organization and guides implementation.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Leverage this blueprint's methodology and tools to complete your own preliminary plan and mitigate the risks of scope expansion mid-program.

55% of S/4HANA projects exceed original budget.
Source: Horvath Partners, 2025

60% experience planning overruns averaging 30% longer.
Source: Horvath Partners, 2025

35% of overruns are driven by scope expansion.
Source: Anchor Group, 2026

NOTE: The cost of an S/4HANA migration varies significantly by migration plan and remediation efforts.

Build your S/4HANA migration plan

Define your migration plan before engaging implementation partners – do not outsource your direction. Own the migration plan up-front to retain control and ensure partners execute your vision, not theirs.

DISCOVER

STRATEGIC INTENT
Lift and Shift | Process Optimization | Digital Transformation

INTERNAL READINESS
Change Appetite & Management

DATA READINESS

PROCESS STANDARDIZATION

CUSTOMIZATION COMPLEXITY

INTEGRATION LANDSCAPE

DEFINE

DEPLOYMENT METHOD
Cloud Private | Cloud Public | On-Premise

MIGRATION STRATEGY
Greenfield | Brownfield | Hybrid

ROLLOUT APPROACH
Big Bang | Phased – Geography | Phased – Modular | Global Template | Two-Tier ERP

DRIVE

INTERNAL TEAM
PROJECT GOVERNANCE
Project Manager | Project Sponsor | Process Owners | Data Lead | Technical Architect | Change Management Lead

EXTERNAL TEAM
TECHNICAL EXECUTION
System Integrators | Implementation Partner

Align Your S/4HANA Migration

Pick what matters most. Accept the trade-offs. Own the long-term impact.

There is no single "right" plan for S/4HANA, but there is a wrong one: migrating without understanding the trade-offs. Success comes from making deliberate decisions and owning their long-term implications.

Use external support for your technical execution

This research does not aim to replace the need for a technical executor. Instead, it aims to support your conversations and help you get through the Phase 0 planning.

• An S/4HANA migration is a full ERP transformation requiring deep technical, functional, and project delivery expertise that most organizations do not have in house. Engaging an implementation partner or systems integrator (SI) is not optional; it is standard practice.
• Most organizations rarely undergo ERP transformations, so it makes sense that this expertise is not present in your organization. During your transformation, you must continue to keep your daily operations running, and not hiring external support may deplete your internal resources.
• The risk is not in hiring a partner – it's in hiring one before you understand your own direction.

61% of companies that are migrating to S/4HANA or have migrated have used external IT consultants/executors.

Source: Horvath Partners, 2025

You don't have to do everything, but you do have to lead it

The complexity of an S/4HANA migration leads organizations to feel like handing off decision-making to their implementation partner is the right thing to do. However, complexity is not a reason to cede control – it's the reason you cannot afford to.

When organizations defer decisions to their partner, they don't eliminate the complexity – they just lose visibility into how it is being resolved. The partner makes choices that are reasonable for delivery but may not be right for the organization.

Info-Tech Insight

Your implementation partner is there to execute. You are there to lead. The organizations that get this right don't do more – they stay present at the decisions that matter and never mistake their partner's confidence for their own clarity.

What happens when you step back

• Scope drifts toward what the partner knows how to deliver.
• Decisions get made by default rather than by design.
• The migration optimizes for go-live, not for long-term fit.
• Intent erodes gradually, without a single moment you can point to.

What leading looks like

• Arriving at every key decision point with a position.
• Understanding the trade-offs well enough to push back when needed.
• Knowing which decisions are yours to own versus delegate.
• Anchoring against intent throughout the migration.

Focus on your decisions, not execution

S/4HANA migrations often stall not because of technical execution but due to a lack of clarity on key decisions and how they shape the migration. Without a structured approach, organizations default to reactive decision-making during implementation or defer critical choices to implementation partners – reducing control and increasing risk.

Budget overruns

Timeline delays

Post go-live instability

Adoption resistance

The most common failure patterns trace back to poor planning and deferred decision-making, not system defects.

More than 60% of companies experience deviations in budget, schedule, and result quality during S/4HANA migration.

Source: Horvath Partners, 2025

Leverage Info-Tech's methodology to build an informed S/4HANA migration plan