Age Before Beauty

Is S/4 Hana still modern enough? What sounds like a simple provocation is an important question to consider, especially for large SAP customers. The conversion to S/4 can take years to complete. Including staff training, changes to business processes, and testing, the impending conversion can take five years or more. 2030 is not only end of support for ERP/ECC 6.0, but also a realistic estimate of when most S/4 projects will be completed.

In 2030, Hana will be 20 years old, and S/4 will celebrate its 15^th birthday. Some Abap code in S/4 is older still. If there will be a Hana 3.0 is as of yet undecided, but we do know that S/4 will be continuously updated. New laws and regulations as well as customer requirements will be the driving force behind the changes.

With forty years of ERP know-how under its belt, SAP’s business processes are still the de facto standard. Of course, competitors like Workday, Oracle, or Salesforce offer good algorithms as well, just much more limited in scope than SAP’s legacy ERP systems. SAP’s interface is a different topic, but its processes have always been and still are top-notch.

SAP’s foundational ERP know-how will not lose its relevancy that fast. Maybe its competitors will leave SAP in the dust when it comes to the modernity of their systems, but ERP competency and unique backoffice algorithms will remain SAP’s specialty alone. Age before beauty doesn’t have to be a disadvantage if SAP plays its cards right.