Why SAP S/4HANA Migrations Stall And How Leaders Can Turn Them Into Real Business Transformation

Walk into most boardrooms debating an SAP S/4HANA migration, and the conversation gravitates towards deployment models, conversion paths, custom code, and timelines. However, Jennifer Colapietro, US Digital Core Modernization Platform Leader at PwC, believes that framing is exactly where most programs go wrong.

Speaking with SAPinsider on the sidelines of SAP Sapphire 2026 Orlando, Colapietro was blunt: “The biggest challenge in SAP S/4HANA migrations is not the technology. It’s change management, and more specifically, we like to define it as organizational business readiness and leadership alignment.”

She noted that treating SAP S/4HANA as an IT upgrade keeps it within the CIO’s office. On the other hand, treating it as a business transformation forces a different conversation; one about workflows, governance, decision rights, and accountability.

The Trap of Preserving the Past

The most common failure mode Colapietro sees is companies dragging their legacy footprint into a modern platform. “Organizations struggle the most when they try to preserve legacy processes instead of simplifying and standardizing them,” she said. “SAP S/4HANA really creates that opportunity to redesign workflows and governance and decision-making for more of an agile enterprise.”

Additionally, lift-and-shift conversions that replicate years of accumulated custom code may technically land on SAP S/4HANA. Still, they inherit the same friction that slowed the previous environment and forfeit the very capabilities that justify the move.

Who Actually Owns the Program

Colapietro was direct about where ownership should sit. “Successful transformation happens when business leaders, not just IT, own the program. The CFO, the CRO, the CHRO, and real functional leaders have to be accountable for business outcomes, adoption, and process transformation,” she observed.

Her second point is just as important: readiness has to start earlier and address behavior, not just system training. “Employees really need to understand how work will change, why it matters, and how the transformation improves the business,” Colapietro said.

That reframing turns adoption from a go-live checkbox into a leadership KPI.

The Real Prize: An AI-Enabled Core

The companies extracting the most value from SAP S/4HANA, Colapietro argued, are not treating it as a modernization project at all. “The companies getting the most value from SAP S/4HANA are treating it as the foundation for an intelligent, AI-enabled enterprise, not simply a modernization project,” she explained. “[That is] because clean processes, trusted data, and that concept of simplified operations are what really ultimately unlock automation and AI at scale.”

She believes that as SAP Business AI capabilities continue to be embedded across the portfolio, the organizations positioned to capture value will not be those with the largest AI budgets. They will be the ones whose underlying processes and data are clean enough for intelligence to operate on.

The Clean Core Imperative

For SAP leaders stuck in the preparation phase, Colapietro’s prescriptive move is unambiguous: commit publicly to a clean core strategy at the executive level.

“The biggest mistake organizations make is just waiting for that perfect roadmap before taking action. Standing still is the riskiest strategy,” she said. The discipline that follows, according to Colapietro, is to treat “customization as the exception, not the default, and aligning the business around standardized, scalable processes.”

The cost of ignoring that discipline compounds an organization’s struggle to migrate. “The organizations that continue layering on custom code and fragmented processes are going to struggle to adopt the future SAP innovations, those Business AI capabilities, and the continuous upgrades at speed,” Colapietro concluded. Thus, every bolt-on workflow added today becomes a tax on every innovation SAP releases tomorrow.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Colapietro’s framing flips the migration question. Instead of asking how to replicate the old environment in SAP S/4HANA, SAPinsiders should be asking how to redesign operations around leading practices and intelligent automation. That is the line between a technical migration and a genuine transformation.

Establish business ownership early, simplify aggressively, and create explicit accountability for data governance and adoption. As Colapietro described, “Technology alone is not going to create the transformation. It’s really the operational discipline that will.”

The clean core is no longer a technical architecture choice. It is the price of admission to an AI-enabled enterprise. Therefore, the organizations that commit to it now will still be moving when the rest of the market is drafting roadmaps.