SAP has set 2027 as the end of mainstream maintenance for ECC — with a possible extension to 2033 under certain conditions. That deadline should be creating urgency across SAP's customer base. Yet according to industry surveys of SAP user groups, 61% of SAP ECC clients have not yet acquired an S/4HANA license (Gartner), and 95% of SAP users report that building a credible ROI for the migration is either very difficult or a genuine strategic challenge. What is holding organizations back — and what does a realistic business case for S/4HANA actually look like?
1Why the ROI Is So Hard to Build
The fundamental difficulty with S/4HANA ROI is that the migration is not an upgrade in the traditional sense. It is a full platform replacement — with new data structures, new processes, new licensing models, and new infrastructure requirements. The costs are visible and front-loaded. The benefits are diffuse and long-term.
Unlike a typical IT project where you replace one system with a better version of the same thing, S/4HANA requires organizations to simultaneously manage: a technical migration, a business process redesign, a data cleanup and harmonization project, an organizational change management program, and a renegotiation of the commercial relationship with SAP.
Each of these workstreams has its own budget, its own timeline, and its own risk profile. Quantifying the combined benefit — faster financial close, real-time inventory visibility, simplified IT landscape — against the combined cost is genuinely complex, and the honest answer is that the numbers are highly context-dependent.
2The Licensing Question: FUE and Cost Unpredictability
One of the most cited obstacles in SAP user group surveys is the unpredictability of SAP's cloud licensing costs. SAP introduced the Full Use Equivalent (FUE) metric as a way to simplify cloud licensing — but for many organizations, it has had the opposite effect.
FUE is a consumption-based metric that aggregates usage across different user types (Professional, Limited, and Self-Service users) into a single equivalent unit. The problem: organizations cannot easily predict their FUE consumption in advance, making three-year and five-year TCO projections unreliable.
Additionally, organizations that have heavily customized their ECC systems face a potentially significant uplift in licensing costs as they move to S/4HANA — because features they built themselves (or bought from third parties) may now be standard S/4HANA capabilities that require additional license entitlements.
383% of SAP Users Do Not Fully Understand SAP's Migration Roadmap
Industry surveys consistently show that the majority of SAP customers do not fully understand the maintenance timelines, migration options, and contractual implications of their current ECC systems. SAP has changed its maintenance end-date messaging multiple times over the past several years — from 2025, to 2027, to a possible 2033 extended maintenance option — creating significant confusion in the market.
For CIOs and CFOs trying to make multi-year investment decisions, this uncertainty is genuinely problematic. If the deadline might shift again, the urgency argument weakens. If the licensing costs might change during the migration project, the ROI model is unreliable. If the technical migration path depends on which version of S/4HANA you target, the scope is unclear.
The result: many organizations are choosing to wait — to see if SAP's commercial terms improve, to see if competitors' migration experiences provide useful benchmarks, and to avoid committing to a large multi-year program in a period of macroeconomic uncertainty.
4The Case For Staying on ECC Longer
94% of SAP users in recent surveys say there is significant value in extending the life of their existing ECC systems. This is not irrational conservatism — it reflects a genuine cost-benefit calculation.
Organizations that invested heavily in adapting ECC to their specific business needs — custom ABAP programs, industry-specific modifications, third-party integrations — face the prospect of having to rebuild or retire all of that investment during the migration. For large, complex ECC landscapes with decades of accumulated customization, this can represent hundreds of person-years of re-implementation work.
Extended maintenance options (SAP's own Extended Maintenance program or third-party support providers) allow organizations to continue running ECC past 2027 while deferring the migration investment. For some organizations, this is the financially rational choice — at least in the short term.
- SAP Extended Maintenance through 2033 is available for an additional fee
- Third-party SAP support providers (Rimini Street, Spinnaker) offer lower-cost maintenance alternatives
- Organizations using extended support should still plan migration — the longer they wait, the larger the technical debt
- SAP's innovation roadmap (AI capabilities, embedded analytics) is increasingly S/4HANA-only
5Where S/4HANA ROI Is Real and Measurable
Despite the challenges, 59% of organizations that have completed S/4HANA migrations report that the platform genuinely accelerates innovation, and 56% cite improved real-time capabilities as a measurable benefit. The ROI is real — it is just concentrated in specific areas.
Financial close acceleration is the most consistently cited benefit. Organizations running S/4HANA report 30–50% reduction in period-end closing time, driven by the Universal Journal's elimination of reconciliation between FI and CO, and the real-time availability of management accounting data.
Inventory optimization is the second most common measurable benefit. The Material Ledger is now mandatory in S/4HANA, providing actual cost accounting in real time. Combined with S/4HANA's embedded MRP Live, organizations report significant improvements in inventory turnover and working capital efficiency.
IT landscape simplification is the third pillar. S/4HANA eliminates the need for several adjacent systems — BW/BI data warehouses (replaced by embedded analytics), standalone CO-PA systems, and multiple reconciliation programs. The reduction in system count and interface complexity has measurable infrastructure cost implications.
6Building a Credible Business Case: What Works
Organizations that successfully justify S/4HANA migration typically build their business case around three or four specific, quantifiable use cases rather than trying to capture all potential benefits in a single number.
Rather than asking 'what is the total ROI of S/4HANA?', successful business cases ask: 'How much does our current financial close cost us, and how much would we save by reducing it from 10 days to 4 days?' or 'What is the annual cost of our current BI infrastructure, and what portion of that could we eliminate with embedded S/4HANA analytics?'
This focused approach is more credible to CFOs and finance committees, easier to validate after go-live, and more resilient to the inevitable scope changes during the migration project.
- Identify 3–4 specific pain points with quantifiable costs in your current ECC landscape
- Request reference visits to similar-sized organizations that have completed their migration
- Model TCO over 7 years (not 3) to capture the full benefit of simplified operations
- Include the cost of NOT migrating: rising ECC customization costs, missed innovation, talent retention
- Negotiate a phased migration with SAP — not all entities need to go live simultaneously
Key Takeaway
The ROI of SAP S/4HANA migration is real but it is not automatic. Organizations that capture the greatest value are those that treat the migration as a business transformation opportunity — not a technical upgrade — and build their business case around specific, measurable outcomes. For those still on the fence, the question is no longer whether to migrate, but how to sequence it, how to phase the investment, and how to negotiate the commercial terms to make the business case work.