Beyond Compliance: The Business Case for Migrating to S/4HANA Now

There is also a forward-looking dimension to the business case that has become sharper over just the past year. SAPinsider's most recent ERP Migration and Transformation benchmark, based on a survey of 296 community members conducted between December 2025 and March 2026, found that SAP's AI announcements had actually overtaken the 2027 maintenance deadline as the top external factor shaping ERP strategy for respondents. That is a meaningful shift in how organizations are framing the decision: increasingly, the conversation isn't “we have to migrate before support ends,” it's “we want the AI-enabled process automation and embedded analytics capabilities SAP is building exclusively for S/4HANA, and the deadline happens to force the timing.”

Basis Technologies' independent “True State of S/4HANA” research, built on an adoption model peer-reviewed by SAP experts and industry analysts, adds a resourcing dimension worth building into any business case: it projects that resource demand for S/4HANA transformations, ECC upgrades and subsequent S/4-to-S/4 upgrades could peak another three to four years out, requiring more than 75% additional resources industry-wide compared to today. Combined with the talent-market tightening covered elsewhere in this research, that projection reinforces the same conclusion from a different angle — the business case for moving early isn't just about capturing benefits sooner, it's about securing the resources to capture them at all before the resourcing peak arrives.