- FAQ
Forty direct answers for your move to S/4HANA.
01 Explore the situation
The decision and the business case
For the CIO, CFO, CEO, COO, and board asking what the company is really solving and why it should act now.
Why do companies need to move from SAP ECC to S/4HANA?
Because the ECC maintenance runway is finite, but the business reason should be bigger than a deadline. SAP currently states that mainstream maintenance for core SAP Business Suite 7 applications runs through the end of 2027, with optional extended maintenance through the end of 2030 for eligible customers. The exact position depends on your products, versions, and contracts, so confirm it with SAP.
Should we wait for AI, another maintenance extension, or a clearer SAP roadmap?
Wait only if the pause has a specific purpose and owner. AI capabilities and SAP offerings will keep changing. Waiting does not clean your data, inventory your custom code and interfaces, free your business experts, or create agreement on the future process.
Is an S/4HANA migration mainly a technical upgrade or a business transformation?
It is both, but the balance is a leadership choice. The technical work includes the platform, data model, custom code, integrations, roles, testing, and cutover. The business work decides which processes to standardize, which exceptions still matter, what users will do differently, and which outcomes justify the investment.
What business value should a manufacturer demand beyond meeting SAP’s deadline?
Demand improvements the business can name, measure, and own. Examples may include a more reliable close, fewer manual handoffs, better material availability, cleaner order-to-cash flow, faster exception handling, clearer plant performance, stronger controls, or a simpler core that is easier to change.
How do we build a defensible S/4HANA business case?
Build the case from a verified baseline, explicit assumptions, and a small number of owned outcomes. Include the cost and risk of the current landscape, the required technical work, optional business improvements, internal business capacity, partner and software costs, contingency, and the operating cost after go-live.
Why do S/4HANA programs run late or over budget?
Usually because important facts and decisions arrive after the plan has already hardened. Common drivers include unclear scope, unused or misunderstood custom code, undocumented interfaces, poor data quality, unresolved add-ons, late business participation, optimistic staffing assumptions, incomplete testing, and commercial estimates built on too many unknowns.
What should the board ask before approving an S/4HANA program?
The board should ask what is known, what is assumed, who owns each decision, and what evidence will trigger the next commitment. It should understand the chosen path, the business outcomes, the range for time and cost, operational risks, required business-expert capacity, data and integration exposure, partner responsibilities, and the plan for testing and cutover.
02 Choose the direction
Choosing the S/4HANA path
For CIOs, enterprise architects, program leaders, and process owners deciding what to carry forward, what to change, and where the system should run.
What is the difference between Brownfield, Greenfield, and selective data transition?
Brownfield converts an existing SAP system, Greenfield starts a new implementation, and selective data transition combines chosen elements of both. SAP’s formal terms are system conversion, new implementation, and selective data transition.
Can a Brownfield conversion still create business value, or does it preserve the past?
Brownfield can still create value if the company makes deliberate modernization choices. The technical path does not require every old process, report, or customization to survive unchanged. It does make it easier for old decisions to travel forward without being questioned.
When does a Greenfield implementation make the most sense?
Greenfield makes the most sense when the company wants a materially different operating model and is willing to adopt more standard processes. It can be attractive when the legacy landscape is highly complex, data quality is poor, customizations have accumulated without clear value, multiple systems must be consolidated, or a new business model requires a cleaner start.
When should we consider selective data transition?
Consider it when you need more choice over what moves, when it moves, and how organizational or historical data is reshaped. Typical reasons include phased rollouts, company-code carve-outs, consolidations, preserving selected history, or avoiding an all-or-nothing cutover.
Should we choose S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Private Edition, or on-premise?
Choose based on the operating model you are prepared to run, not on a slogan about cloud. Public Edition generally asks for more standardization and a more SAP-managed cadence. Private Edition offers more flexibility for complex landscapes and existing investments. On-premise gives the customer more infrastructure and lifecycle control, with more operating responsibility.
What is RISE with SAP, and how is it different from S/4HANA?
S/4HANA is the ERP system. RISE with SAP is a commercial and transformation offering built around moving and running SAP cloud ERP. RISE can bundle software, infrastructure, services, methods, and tools, but it does not replace the need to choose a path, design the business processes, prepare data, test, manage change, and define responsibilities.
How much historical data should we carry into S/4HANA?
Carry what operations, reporting, audit, and legal obligations require, not everything simply because it exists. Separate master data, open items, balances, active documents, comparative reporting data, and older history. Decide what belongs in the new system, what can remain accessible through an archive, and what should be defensibly deleted.
Which customizations should we keep, and what does clean core really mean?
Keep customization only when it supports a real differentiator or requirement that standard SAP cannot meet acceptably. Retire unused code, challenge custom workarounds, and prefer released interfaces and supported extension patterns when change is still needed.
03 Build the plan
Planning without late surprises
For the transformation office, IT director, SAP program manager, functional leads, data team, architects, controls team, and business experts doing the work.
What should an S/4HANA readiness assessment cover before we select an SI or approve the scope?
It should cover the real technical landscape and the real business operating model. Technical scope includes versions, simplification items, compatibility scope, add-ons, business functions, sizing, data volume, custom code, interfaces, Business Partner readiness, security, and system landscape dependencies.
How can we estimate a realistic S/4HANA timeline and budget before the blueprint is finished?
Use evidence-backed ranges and make every major assumption visible. Estimate from process scope, entities and countries, chosen path, data volume and quality, custom code, integrations, deployment model, testing, cutover, business capacity, and partner model. Identify which unknowns could materially move the range.
Who should own the S/4HANA program: the business, IT, or the system integrator?
The customer must own the outcome. The CIO is accountable for the program. Business process owners decide how the company will operate. IT owns architecture, security, integration, environments, and coordination. The SI brings method, specialist skill, configuration, and delivery capacity.
How much time will business experts need, and how do we avoid burning them out?
No credible approach removes the need for business judgment. The goal is to use scarce experts at the moments where their knowledge changes the outcome. Give them a working process to react to, short decision-focused sessions, prepared choices, clear authority, and a visible calendar.
How should we handle data quality and data migration?
Treat data as a business workstream with named owners, not as a late technical upload. Inventory the objects, profile quality, define target rules, remove duplicates, resolve Business Partner issues, map values, and decide what will be archived or left behind. Finance and operations must own reconciliation rules.
How do we find the custom-code, interface, add-on, and Business Partner risks before they break the plan?
Build a usage-based inventory and trace each item to a business process and owner. Use SAP checks to identify affected custom code, simplification items, add-ons, interfaces, and Customer/Vendor Integration issues. Then classify each item: retire, replace with standard, remediate, rebuild, or investigate.
What testing and control evidence should we require before go-live?
Require traceable evidence that critical business processes, data, controls, integrations, and operating procedures work together. The plan should cover unit, string, end-to-end, regression, performance, security, role and segregation-of-duties, data reconciliation, user acceptance, and cutover rehearsal.
Should we use a big-bang or phased rollout, and how do we protect operations during cutover?
Choose the rollout shape from business dependencies and readiness, not from ideology. A big bang may avoid long coexistence but concentrates risk. Phasing can reduce each event’s scope but adds temporary integrations, reconciliation, support, and design constraints.
04 Use AI with control
AI and agents in the S/4HANA program
For CIOs, enterprise architects, program leaders, CISOs, privacy teams, internal audit, and business owners separating useful automation from magic-bullet claims.
Where can AI and agents create value before, during, and after an S/4HANA program?
AI can accelerate bounded work that has clear context, tools, and verification. Before the program, it can help organize findings, code and interface analysis, process evidence, and documentation. During delivery, it can support configuration tasks, data mapping, test creation, validation, defect triage, decision capture, and impact analysis. After go-live, it can help maintain documentation, assess changes, and support regression testing.
Can AI design or configure S/4HANA without experienced SAP and business experts?
No. AI can reduce repeatable effort and expose choices faster, but it cannot own the company’s operating model, policy, risk, or exceptions. Experienced SAP people understand system behavior and dependencies. Business experts know which real-world exceptions are necessary and which are historical habit.
Why does business and SAP context matter more than the AI model or prompt?
Because the correct answer depends on relationships a generic model does not know. A useful system needs the customer’s processes, roles, data definitions, configuration, custom code, interfaces, policies, decisions, tests, and technical objects. It also needs SAP-specific knowledge of how those pieces affect one another.
How do we stop AI from hallucinating or making the wrong S/4HANA change?
You do not eliminate uncertainty with a prompt. You control it with architecture, permissions, tests, and human approval. Ground outputs in approved sources. Restrict tools and data. Use least privilege. Run work in nonproduction environments. Apply deterministic checks where possible. Require approval before consequential changes. Log sources, model versions, tool calls, outputs, and decisions.
What customer data is safe to share with an AI partner or use in a test drive?
Share the minimum data needed for the agreed proof, and settle the controls before any transfer. Classify the data. Prefer synthetic, masked, anonymized, or tightly sampled information when it can still prove the process. Remove personal, regulated, sensitive commercial, and credential data unless there is a documented need and approved protection.
What governance, human approvals, and audit trail do AI agents need?
Every agent needs a named business owner, a technical owner, a defined purpose, an approved data scope, and a clear ceiling on what it can do. Risk-tier the use case. Apply role-based access, least privilege, segregation of duties, approval thresholds, monitoring, exception handling, incident response, and periodic revalidation.
Should we use SAP Joule, custom agents, or a partner’s specialized agents?
Use the smallest governed option that has the right context and can prove the outcome. SAP-provided capabilities may offer native application context and lifecycle alignment. Custom agents may fit differentiating workflows. A partner’s agents may bring specialized implementation knowledge or a connected model the customer would take years to build.
05 Evaluate the partner
Evaluating LeapGreat and FrontLoad
For the CIO, procurement team, transformation office, SI, and business leaders deciding whether LeapGreat belongs in the plan.
What is LeapGreat, and what does “Agentic S/4HANA Accelerator” mean?
LeapGreat is a subscription software platform that puts a working S/4HANA development system at the beginning of the program. “Agentic S/4HANA Accelerator” is the category name, not a promise that AI runs the project alone.
Can LeapGreat really show us our business in S/4HANA by Friday, and does that mean we are live?
By Friday means one core process from your business is running in S/4HANA in front of you. It does not mean production go-live. Production still takes real business decisions, refinement, data work, integration, testing, user acceptance, cutover, and operational readiness.
What happens in the free test drive, and what input will LeapGreat need from us?
You give LeapGreat an hour to present your company and one real process, with the questions supplied in advance. LeapGreat comes back with a 90-minute working session for the CIO and IT director where you see that process in S/4HANA and discuss the strategic decisions around it.
Is the free test drive a demo we will throw away?
The free test drive is the preview. Paid FrontLoad starts in the development system that carries into the implementation. The work you approve in the paid phase keeps building toward go-live instead of being rebuilt from a presentation.
What is FrontLoad, and what do we have after three weeks plus Day 1?
FrontLoad is LeapGreat’s three-week opening move followed by a hands-on Day 1. Week 1 is Rapid Assessment. Week 2 is Rapid Build. Week 3 adds the Digital Twin. On Day 1, workstream leads train in the working system and begin the ongoing build, test, and refine loop.
What is LeapGreat’s Digital Twin, and what happens after go-live?
The Digital Twin is the living model that connects the customer’s working system to its processes, roles, data, decisions, documentation, and tests. During the program, it gives business and IT one place to understand what is being built and why.
We already have a system integrator. Why add LeapGreat, and who runs the project?
Keep your SI. Your company still runs the project. The integrator can continue to coach, configure, and deliver. LeapGreat changes the starting point and the shared evidence: your team and your SI make decisions against a working system instead of relying only on documents.
Does LeapGreat work with Brownfield, public cloud, private cloud, and GROW with SAP?
LeapGreat’s current positioning supports Brownfield as a companion path and supports public or private cloud decisions. Brownfield stays Brownfield. FrontLoad adds an early working view of the business, connected documentation, and customer control. GROW with SAP is considered a strong fit because it typically points toward a cleaner, more standard starting point.
Where are LeapGreat’s completed customer references?
LeapGreat does not have a completed public platform reference yet. Projects are in flight, and LeapGreat should not dress that up. Founder experience establishes relevant authority. A working test drive establishes capability. Neither one proves the typical time, cost, risk, or business outcome of a completed LeapGreat customer program.
How much does LeapGreat cost?
LeapGreat is sold as a subscription platform, and the free test drive has no charge. Public pricing has not been ratified. The subscription is scoped with the plan. Coaching may be a separate service when the customer’s SI does not provide it.
See one real process in S/4HANA by Friday.
Give LeapGreat an hour. We come back with your own business process running in a working system.