The Financial Case for SAP S/4HANA Migration: Beyond “ECC Is Being Retired”
A maintenance deadline can get a migration funded. It rarely, on its own, makes the case for the level of investment the program actually requires — that case has to rest on quantifiable return.
The Financial Case for SAP S/4HANA Migration: Beyond “ECC Is Being Retired”
A maintenance deadline can get a migration funded. It rarely, on its own, makes the case for the level of investment the program actually requires — that case has to rest on quantifiable return.
“SAP is retiring ECC” is a true statement, and it is also, on its own, a weak business case. A deadline explains why an organization must eventually act; it says nothing about why a particular level of investment, in a particular timeframe, with a particular scope, is the right choice. Boards approve capital for compelling returns, not for compliance with a vendor’s support calendar — and a business case built only on the deadline tends to produce exactly the outcome that framing implies: the minimum viable migration, timed to the deadline, scoped to avoid the support cliff rather than to capture value.
A durable business case answers a different, harder question: independent of the maintenance calendar, what return justifies this investment? The evidence on that question is more specific — and more useful to a finance committee — than most migration proposals make it out to be.
What the quantified evidence shows
A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by SAP, published in September 2019, offers one of the more rigorously documented answers available. Based on interviews with four SAP S/4HANA customers and a broader survey of 110 organizations, Forrester constructed a composite organization to model the three-year, risk-adjusted financial impact of migration. The results: a 134% return on investment, a payback period of
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