SAP S4/HANA Driven Finance Transformation - South Africa Service Sheet

Chief Financial Officers of businesses run on SAP are under pressure to move to SAP S4/HANA in response to a maintenance cut-off for their existing SAP Enterprise Central Component (ECC) implementations.

When SAP launched S4/HANA they announced that support for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP Customer Relationship Management 7.0, SAP Supply Chain Management 7.0, wand SAP Supplier Relationship Management 7.0 applications and SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA would be stopped at the end of 2025. This forced Chief Financial Officers to consider their next SAP implementation earlier that many would have liked to.

In early 2020 SAP announced an extension of the ‘2025’ deadline for maintenance cut off to end 2027. Beyond 2027, customers in transition will have the option to purchase extended maintenance through to the end of 2030 at a premium of two percent above existing maintenance prices of 22%.

This deadline extension provides some breathing room to Chief Financial Officers, but their challenges remain.

The Chief Financial Officer Challenge

The thought of another SAP implementation leaves a bitter taste in the mouth for many Chief Financial Officers. Experience has taught that large Enterprise Resource Planning implementations often don’t live up to expectations, takes longer to complete, cost more than originally planned and delivers less than it promised.

In many cases implementations of SAP Enterprise Central Components are ongoing and have not reached a stage of maturity where it can deliver transformational benefits or any associated return on investment.

The move to SAP S4/HANA is not a technical upgrade. Our experience has shown us that in most cases significant preparation work is needed in process and data layers to enable the move the SAP S4/HANA. The change in underlying database technology forces a big change across all layers of the operating model.