Decide What To Do About SAP 2027 Before It Decides For You

Mainstream maintenance for SAP ECC 6.0 ends on 31 December 2027. Your system does not switch off. What stops is the support, the legal and tax patches and the security fixes. You can buy extended maintenance to 2030 at a premium on your existing support fee, which buys time rather than solving anything. The practical effect is that the decision has to be made in the next two to three years, and the work itself takes 12 to 24 months for most mid-sized landscapes.

Brownfield keeps your history, your configuration and your custom code, and is usually cheaper and quicker, but it carries your existing process debt into S/4HANA. Greenfield gives you clean processes on SAP standard and is the honest answer when your current configuration no longer reflects how the business runs, but it costs more and asks far more of your people. Selective data transition sits between them and suits carve-outs, mergers and multi-entity consolidation. We cost all three against your landscape and recommend one.

RISE bundles the S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition licence, the infrastructure on a hyperscaler, and the basis and technical managed service into a single subscription contract with SAP. It does not include your implementation, your integration work or your application support. The trade-off is control. Under RISE, SAP holds the hyperscaler contract and runs the basis layer, which suits teams without a strong basis function. Running your own account on Azure, AWS or GCP keeps the commercial levers with you and usually looks better at renewal if you have the skills in-house.

In most estates we see, 30 to 50 percent of custom objects have not been executed in the last year and can simply be dropped. Of what remains, the majority needs only simplification fixes, and a smaller set needs a genuine rewrite, typically anything touching MATNR field length, the removed aggregate tables or direct reads against tables S/4HANA has restructured. The SAP Readiness Check and ATC scans give you real numbers in two to three weeks, and that number drives the cost of every option on the table.

No, and trying to is how roadmaps become fiction. The decisions that cannot wait are the conversion approach, the hosting and contract model, and the first wave of scope, because those set the budget and the timeline. Module-level scope for year two and three is placed on the roadmap as a direction and revisited at each wave. We mark clearly which items are committed and which are still open.

A written assessment of your current landscape, a custom code readiness analysis with object counts by remediation effort, a costed comparison of brownfield, greenfield and selective transition, a hosting and licensing position including any digital access exposure, a 12 to 36 month roadmap by wave, and a business case with the numbers behind it. It is written to be usable with any implementation partner, including ones that are not us.