What the SAP S/4HANA debate teaches the mid-market

Large enterprises running old SAP ERP are under pressure. Standard maintenance ends at the end of 2027, and later options either cost extra or postpone the issue. According to Computerwoche, only around 20 percent of SAP customers are already using S/4HANA productively as their core application, while typical transformation projects take seven to nine years. The Computerwoche expert round table of 23 July 2026 is therefore not only a SAP story. It is a lesson for every ERP decision in the mid-market.

The key message is simple: ERP projects rarely fail because of the software. They fail because of scope, data, organisation and change. That is where the business value is won or lost.

“S/4HANA is not a like-for-like upgrade. It changes data models, processes, and extensibility. Treat it as a fresh implementation with a complex conversion path, not a patch.”
Eric Kimberling, Third Stage Consulting, on why moving from SAP ECC to S/4HANA should not be treated like a normal update. Source

Seven lessons for the mid-market

Pressure is a poor adviser

Many SAP customers are moving because they have to, not because they want to. Mid-market companies should check every ERP decision against one question: does this solve today’s operational pain, or are we reacting to deadlines and vendor pressure?

A one-to-one move changes little

If old processes, dead structures and dirty master data simply move into a new system, the migration may be technically successful but commercially weak. Before configuration starts, leadership should decide what will be removed, standardised or protected as a real differentiator.

Custom code in the core becomes debt

Large ERP landscapes often carry thousands of custom programmes. Some matter. Many are habit. For the mid-market, the better architecture is often a lean cloud ERP for finance, purchasing, sales, inventory and production, surrounded by targeted automation and AI agents.

AI helps, but does not fix poor planning

Migration tools and AI can reduce effort, especially in analysis, clean-up and transformation. But AI is no substitute for clear priorities. In the mid-market, AI should first be used where it saves time every day: repeatable, rule-based and search-intensive work.

Scope decides

Projects that want everything from day one often fail before implementation begins. A better start is three to five processes that currently cost time, money or customer trust.

Functions and leadership carry the project

The people who know the business best are usually tied up in daily operations. If their time is not protected, the project lacks exactly the knowledge needed for testing, acceptance and adoption.

Cloud is not automatically progress

An ERP hosted in a data centre is not necessarily true SaaS. Leadership should ask who runs updates, how quickly innovation arrives, what operations really cost and whether individual processes can be connected without distorting the core.

The business translation

When SAP S/4HANA is still the right league

S/4HANA can be right when a company is already deeply embedded in SAP, must follow group requirements, runs highly complex global supply-chain and finance structures, and has the budget, time and internal capacity for a multi-year programme. If one of these conditions is missing, “SAP because SAP” can become an expensive answer to the wrong question.

The alternative for operational mid-market companies

Exact Online Premium covers core commercial and operational processes: finance, purchasing, sales, inventory and production. AI agents take over company-specific work that used to live in Excel, copy-paste routines, fax processes or expensive custom code: checking special items, preparing documents, drafting supplier requests, detecting exceptions or standardising logistics handovers.

The ERP remains the system of record. Agents work around it, with human approval where liability and money are involved. This is the mid-market version of clean core: standard in the core, intelligence at the edge, control with leadership.

Questions for the next leadership meeting

1. Which three processes currently cost us the most time, errors or customer trust?
2. Which company-specific habits are real differentiators, and which are just habit?
3. How many internal expert days can we protect over the next twelve months?
4. Do we want a multi-year transformation programme, or measurable relief within months?
5. Should individuality live inside the ERP core or next to it as a controllable agent layer?

Source

Expert impulse from: Computerwoche, “SAP S/4HANA-Transformation zwischen Aufbruch und Realität”, 23 July 2026. Business interpretation and recommendation: Wolf Schumacher, Productive Vision (PRODVIS).