Most SAP S/4HANA programs begin with the same exercise: document the current state. Teams spend months mapping existing processes, cataloging customizations, interviewing stakeholders across every department, and producing detailed as-is and to-be documentation. The logic is reasonable. You need to understand where you are before you can decide where you are going.
The problem is what happens next. By the time the as-is analysis is complete, the organization has invested significant time and budget, and the project has yet to produce anything the business can act on. Worse, the as-is documentation often anchors the design conversation in existing processes rather than future possibilities. Gartner predicts that more than 70% of ERP initiatives will fail to meet their original business case goals. A significant share of that failure starts right here, in the first phase, with a design approach that optimizes for understanding the past rather than testing the future. With SAP ECC mainstream maintenance ending December 31, 2027, most organizations do not have the runway to spend their first phase looking backward.
The As-Is Trap
As-is documentation serves a legitimate purpose. You need to know what customizations exist, what integrations are in place, and where the operational dependencies are. But in practice, as-is analysis often becomes the project’s longest phase, consuming months before anyone discusses the target state. The output is hundreds of pages of process maps describing how the organization works today, including all the workarounds, redundancies, and legacy decisions that have accumulated over a decade or more on ECC.
The risk is that this documentation becomes the design baseline. When the to-be workshops begin, stakeholders default to asking how the new system will replicate what they already have. The conversation gravitates toward preserving familiar processes rather than evaluating whether those processes should exist at all. A platform upgrade like S/4HANA is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to clean up, modernize, and rethink how the business operates. Starting from the past makes it structurally difficult to take that opportunity. McKinsey’s research on the AI-ERP divide reinforces this: companies that lift and shift legacy processes into new systems are the ones that fail to capture the value the platform was designed to deliver.
Starting From the Future Has Its Own Problem
The alternative, starting from SAP’s standard best practices and working backward, is the premise behind fit-to-standard and greenfield approaches. The idea is sound: begin with what S/4HANA does out of the box, evaluate where the standard works, and only customize where the business has a genuine differentiator.
The Missing Option: Start With a Working System
Both the as-is and to-be approaches share the same structural flaw: they ask people to make consequential decisions based on documents, diagrams, and workshop discussions rather than a running system. The as-is approach produces a detailed map of the past. The to-be approach produces a theoretical model of the future. Neither gives stakeholders something they can actually test.
There is a third option: start with the future state and make it tangible from day one. LeapGreat’s FrontLoad™ approach does this by producing a fully working SAP S/4HANA system, built on SAP Best Practices and configured with the customer’s actual business data, within one week of receiving requirements. It is the actual target environment, built to be refined through iterative cycles with stakeholder feedback.
When the future state exists as a running system from week one, the as-is-versus-to-be question resolves itself. Stakeholders are no longer debating abstractions. They can see how the standard processes handle their data, identify gaps, and make informed decisions about what to keep, what to change, and what to leave behind. The as-is knowledge still matters, but its role changes. Instead of anchoring a theoretical design, it informs the refinement of something real. If your organization has already invested in as-is documentation, that work is not wasted. It becomes input to the first refinement cycle rather than the foundation of a blueprint that will be challenged later.
Why the Starting Point Determines the Outcome
The design approach you choose in the first phase of an SAP transformation has consequences that compound throughout the project. Start with months of as-is documentation, and you anchor the team in the past. Start with abstract to-be workshops, and you build a design that will be challenged in testing. Start with a working system configured with real data, and you give every stakeholder a common reference point from the beginning.
The organizations that move fastest through S/4HANA programs are not the ones that document the most. They are the ones who see their future state earliest. We explored the downstream consequences of late visibility in Why SAP Transformation Programs Discover Problems Too Late.
See your future-state system in one week. Get in touch to see how FrontLoad™ works with your data, or explore the FrontLoad™ approach in detail.
