Preparing Your Organization for an SAP S/4HANA Migration: A Readiness Framework

integration continuity, a proven partner — are not aspirations. They are the specific conditions a readiness assessment needs to test for directly, one by one.

Notably, these figures describe barriers reported by organizations already engaged with their migration, not organizations that have failed to begin. That is the point: cost overruns and duration slippage are rarely surprises that appear from nowhere mid-project. They are, in the great majority of cases, symptoms of conditions that existed and were measurable before the project started, but were not measured.

A structured readiness assessment typically examines a consistent set of variables, regardless of which systems integrator or advisory firm conducts it, because these are the conditions that most reliably predict outcome, not merely activity.

Executive sponsorship: is there a named, accountable executive sponsor with the authority to make and defend difficult scope and timeline decisions, or is sponsorship distributed diffusely enough that no one owns the hard calls?

Change management readiness: has the organization budgeted real time and resource for user adoption and training, or is change management a line item added late because a template required one?

Testing discipline: does the organization have a realistic plan and resourcing for integration and user- acceptance testing, or is testing scheduled optimistically against a fixed go-live date regardless of what testing reveals?

Data migration integrity: has master and transactional data been profiled for quality issues, or is data migration assumed to be a straightforward technical extract?

Integration testing: are the organization’s upstream and downstream system integrations (banking, EDI, tax, third-party logistics, and similar) fully inventoried, or does the true integration count only become clear once the technical team starts looking?