Six Ways an S/4HANA Migration Goes Sideways

Six Ways an S/4HANA Migration Goes Sideways

Most migrations that struggle don’t fail on the technology. They fail on a handful of decisions that were made late, made by default, or never made at all. Here are the six worth catching early.

Ask people who have finished an ECC to S/4HANA project what they would change and the software hardly comes up. They talk about the custom code nobody scanned until month five, the customer master that turned out to be full of duplicates, the test cycle that got trimmed to hold a date. The product mostly does what SAP says it does. The trouble sits in the choices around it.

Time matters here too. Mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 on EHP 6 to 8 ends on December 31, 2027, which leaves about fifteen months, and a mistake that only shows itself at go-live is one you may not have room to fix. The six pitfalls below come up again and again in SAP’s own conversion guidance and in what practitioners write once the dust has settled. None of them is exotic. Most are cheap to avoid if someone raises them early enough.

Plenty of programs are set up under the CIO, staffed with technical people, and shown to the business shortly before go-live. Panaya, which says it has been called in to rescue projects that went off track, puts this first on its list of common mistakes: when the business is left out of key decisions, the

The fix is unglamorous. Name a business owner for each major process area on day one, and give them real decisions to make rather than documents to sign. If the head of procurement can’t explain what