SAPinsider is currently running research that focuses on how organizations are planning for an SAP S/4HANA deployment. While the final report on Deployment Approaches for SAP S/4HANA will be published later this month, there are already some interesting insights that can be discussed as the survey comes to a close. If you wish to participate in the survey you can do so using this link. As survey responses come in, one aspect that has emerged is the timeframe over which respondents plan on deploying SAP S/4HANA. While many see the SAP S/4HANA deployment as an opportunity to re-engineer existing processes to better meet current needs, that is not true for every organization.

Speed of SAP S/4HANA Deployment

When asked what type of deployment they were planning for SAP S/4HANA, slightly more than a third of respondents (36%) said that they want to complete the project as quickly as possible. This group is also more likely than the survey as a whole to be performing a system conversion, or brownfield, implementation. However, nearly two thirds of respondents (64%) said that they are moving to SAP S/4HANA as part of broader transformation within their organization. Why is this important? An SAP S/4HANA deployment can be long even for organizations that are looking to complete their move as quickly as possible. In our 2021 research we say that, while the greatest number of respondents said that they expected their deployment to take between six and twelve months, the average expected deployment for SAP S/4HANA was between twelve and eighteen months. This may seem like a long time, but some of the biggest challenges that organizations experience with their move include cleansing and improving data, preparing new infrastructure, ensuring that third party applications can successfully integrate with SAP S/4HANA, completing user acceptance testing, and ensuring that roles, authorizations, and separation of duties responsibilities are in line with the new roles in SAP S/4HANA. This doesn’t even include evaluating customizations and eliminating those that are either no longer in use or aren’t required in the new system. Also relevant to this is the fact that, in our 2021 research, nearly two thirds of those who currently have no plans to deploy SAP S/4HANA said that they would consider a move if the deployment timeline was shorter. How that question is answered this year will be of great interest.

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

Whether to move to SAP S/4HANA is in constant discussion among organizations running SAP ERP software. Some have already switched to the new system, while others currently have no plans to adopt the solution. Whatever your organization decides around the solution, your input is valuable to the community and I would encourage you to provide input to our research. To get the latest information on how SAP S/4HANA is currently being deployed, please download the report.