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

Go-live strategy: is there a defined, rehearsed cutover and hypercare plan, including a genuine rollback contingency, or does “go-live plan” mean a date on a calendar?

ASUG’s adoption research reinforces the weight of the second item in particular: 43% of member organizations named change management and user adoption as a top migration risk, and 57% now recommend starting change management earlier in the program than they did themselves — a seven-point increase from the year before, and a fairly direct signal that organizations are learning this lesson from experience rather than from theory.

Research from the Project Management Institute’s Pulse of the Profession 2025 study rated stakeholder management and engagement between 91% and 94% in importance across scope, budget, and timeline risk categories — placing it among the highest-rated factors in the entire study, ahead of many more traditionally “technical” project disciplines. That finding is worth taking literally rather than treating as a truism: an organization can have excellent technical architecture, a capable systems integrator, and a realistic budget, and still see a program falter because the stakeholders whose cooperation the program depends on were never genuinely aligned on what was changing and why.

A readiness assessment that only examines technical and financial variables — architecture, licensing, budget — will systematically miss this risk, because stakeholder alignment does not show up in a system landscape diagram. It shows up only when someone asks the stakeholders directly, and takes the answers seriously even when they are inconvenient.

The purpose of assessing readiness this rigorously is not to delay the decision to migrate — organizations facing a 2027 maintenance deadline do not have unlimited time to deliberate. It is to ensure that whatever timeline is chosen is chosen with an accurate understanding of what it will actually require, so the plan reflects the organization’s true starting point rather than an optimistic one.

Orpington Technologies’ Implementation Confidence Diagnostic scores exactly these six variables — executive sponsorship, change management readiness, testing discipline, data migration integrity, integration testing, and go-live strategy — starting with a free, fifteen-minute self- assessment, with an evidence-verified Full ERP Diagnostic Report available for organizations that want a certified expert review before committing to a program timeline.