The Hidden Costs of Delaying Your SAP S/4HANA Migration

The least visible cost of delay is also the most persistent: every year an ECC landscape continues operating unchanged is a year in which its custom code, its integrations, and its accumulated workarounds continue to be built upon, rather than reduced. A workflow patched together three years ago to handle an edge case becomes, three years later, a dependency that a newer process now quietly relies on — and untangling it becomes progressively more expensive the longer it is left in place, simply because more has been built on top of it in the meantime.

This is why the organizations best positioned for a 2027 transition are rarely the ones that simply started earliest in calendar terms. They are the ones that used their remaining runway actively — auditing custom code, cleansing master data, documenting the business logic behind long-standing workarounds — rather than treating the maintenance deadline as something to worry about only once it is close. An extended- maintenance period spent this way is a legitimate, cost-effective bridge. The same period spent without that work underway is simply deferred spending with interest.

Ask what the extended-maintenance premium is actually buying — security patching only, or security patching plus a funded, active de-risking program running in parallel.

Model the implementation timeline against the shrinking pool of available specialist capacity as 2027 approaches, not against today’s vendor availability.

Treat unresolved custom-code and data-quality issues as a cost that accrues interest, not as a fixed backlog that will cost the same to fix whenever it is eventually addressed.

Orpington Technologies’ Implementation Risk Remediation service is built specifically for this window — scoped, fixed-fee advisory sprints that address named gaps (data quality, custom-code exposure, partner accountability) rather than an open-ended retainer, with Orpington available to lead the remediation work directly or oversee it alongside an existing team. Organizations currently in, or approaching, an extended-maintenance period can use this time productively by speaking with Orpington Technologies about what a remediation sprint would prioritize first.