Data Migration Failures: The Quiet Killer of S/4HANA Projects

Data Migration Failures: The Quiet Killer of S/4HANA Projects

It rarely makes the executive summary, but data quality work is where a surprising share of migration budgets and timelines actually go off the rails.

When an S/4HANA project runs late, the postmortem usually points at something visible: scope creep, a vendor dispute, an unexpected customization. Less visible, and more common than the postmortems suggest, is a problem that starts months earlier and compounds quietly: the data itself. Industry analysis of migration overruns attributes approximately 32% of migration delays and 27% of budget overruns directly to data quality issues — numbers large enough that data problems deserve to be treated as a primary risk, not a footnote under “technical workstreams.”

Part of the problem is a mismatch between where the risk actually sits and where the budget actually goes. The same analysis notes that organizations typically allocate only 7 to 9% of total project budget to data preparation, despite its outsized influence on whether the whole implementation succeeds. That is a strikingly small investment given what's riding on it: SAPinsider's 2025 Migration Benchmark research found that 65% of organizations identified severe data quality deficiencies after go-live — discovered, in other words, only once it was already too late to fix cheaply.