Building a Realistic Migration Timeline Before It's Too Late

Run that arithmetic against the actual calendar. From today, there are well under 500 days remaining before SAP's mainstream maintenance for ECC ends on December 31, 2027. An organization with a moderately complex landscape planning on an 18-to-24-month program, and building in a realistic assessment and vendor-selection phase before the technical work even starts, is already looking at a start date that needed to be months ago — not a start date still comfortably in the future. For any organization with a genuinely complex, heavily customized landscape looking at the 30-to-42-month range some research cites, the honest read of the calendar is that a 2027 go-live may no longer be achievable at all, which makes extended maintenance planning, covered elsewhere in this research, a near-term necessity rather than a hypothetical fallback.

This is exactly the mistake industry analysis keeps flagging under different names: “decision compression,” the gradual narrowing of strategic options that happens when organizations delay planning until deadline pressure forces rushed choices. It manifests in a predictable sequence — experienced talent becomes unavailable as early movers lock down the best consultants, rates climb 30 to 50% as demand peaks, and scope decisions get made by default rather than by design, typically collapsing toward the fastest brownfield option chosen for speed rather than fit. Organizations that complete a formal landscape assessment before committing to an approach consistently resolve scope disputes in weeks rather than months, and avoid the mid-program blueprint revisions that account for the majority of the cost overruns documented throughout this research.