Every quarter that passes, the runway for ECC gets shorter — and the queue for experienced migration teams gets longer. After scoping and delivering S/4HANA programs across Thailand, Singapore, India and China, we have distilled our discovery work into a checklist we run with every client before anyone talks about timelines.
1. Know which migration you are actually doing
"Moving to S/4HANA" means three very different projects depending on your starting point: a greenfield reimplementation, a brownfield system conversion, or a selective data transition. The right answer is driven less by IT preference and more by how much of your current process design is worth keeping. Be honest here — a brownfield conversion of a heavily customized, poorly documented ECC is just moving the mess to faster hardware.
2. Triage your custom code early
Run the custom code analysis long before you commit to a plan. In our experience the results cluster into three buckets:
- Dead weight — code not executed in the last 12 months. Typically 30–50% of the estate. Delete, don't migrate.
- Standard-replaceable — custom reports and workflows that S/4HANA or Fiori apps now cover out of the box.
- Genuine differentiators — the 10–20% worth remediating properly, ideally as clean-core extensions on BTP.
3. Answer the license question before the design question
Contract conversions, user-type mapping and digital access can materially change the business case. Getting a licensing position early prevents a painful renegotiation mid-project.
4. Treat data as a workstream, not a task
Master data quality is the single most common cause of go-live delays we see. Stand up a data workstream with named owners in week one: cleansing rules, mock-load cycles and reconciliation reports — rehearsed at least twice before cutover.
5. Plan the people, not just the plan
A migration is 12–18 months of sustained effort on top of business as usual. Whether you staff it with internal people backfilled by contractors, or an external delivery team with internal product owners, decide deliberately — the accidental version of this decision is where budgets go to die.
If you want a second opinion on your migration scope — or the specialists to deliver it — we are happy to compare notes.