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An unsupported ERP system doesn't fail on day one. It degrades quietly, in ways that show up first in an audit finding or a missed tax update — and Canadian finance and compliance teams are already flagging it.
Every SAP customer left to migrate is competing for the same shrinking pool of experienced S/4HANA consultants. The rate increases already showing up in the market are a preview, not the peak.
The three main migration approaches trade speed for transformation in different proportions. Survey data shows most companies are choosing based on urgency, not strategy — and that has consequences.
Two independent studies, run a year apart, land on almost the same number. That kind of agreement is rare in ERP research, and it should worry anyone assuming their migration will be the exception.
Gartner's own tracking of the installed base shows a migration that is real, but nowhere near fast enough to clear the field before the deadline arrives.
SAP's mainstream maintenance clock on ECC is not a rumour or a negotiating tactic. Here is exactly what stops, what survives, and why the calendar matters more than most IT roadmaps admit.
Go-live is a milestone, not a finish line, and the discipline built during migration, clean data, governed code, continuous testing, real-time monitoring, has to become permanent practice for the investment to pay off, with AI-readiness following as one more benefit of keeping it up
SAP's mainstream maintenance for ECC ends December 31, 2027, and the business case that justifies an S/4HANA migration needs to hold up long after the budget meeting that approved it. Most get built early, on thin information, and never revisited, a habit that gets riskier with every month left before the deadline closes off options, AI-assisted modeling included.
As more organizations race to be live well before the ECC mainstream maintenance deadline, hypercare, the critical stabilization window right after go-live, is the phase most project plans still leave understaffed, with AI-assisted monitoring only helping teams catch problems a little faster.