Webinar Recap: What Buyers Ask Most About SAP S/4HANA Migrations
Buyers evaluating SAP rarely fail on the demo — they fail on the details that only surface months into a live deployment. Here's what the SAP projects that actu…
Buyers evaluating SAP rarely fail on the demo — they fail on the details that only surface months into a live deployment. Here's what the SAP projects that actually stick tend to get right, based on patterns we see across dozens of implementations.
None of what follows is exotic. It's the unglamorous groundwork that gets skipped under deadline pressure, and that buyers almost never hear about until they're the ones living with the consequences.
Timelines slip in the same three places
Data migration, user acceptance testing, and third-party integrations are where SAP timelines consistently slip — not because the platform is slow, but because those three steps are usually scoped optimistically.
Ask any implementation partner for their actual delivered timelines, not their proposed ones, and you'll see the same twenty-to-thirty percent overrun on almost every SAP project of meaningful size. Build that buffer into your internal communications before the project starts, not after the first missed milestone.
Support tiers matter more after year one
Everyone reads the SLA during procurement. Almost no one re-reads it eighteen months later, once the original SAP project team has moved on and support tickets are the only lifeline left.
Ask specifically who answers a P1 ticket at 6pm on a Friday, not just what the contract promises. The gap between contracted and actual support responsiveness is where long-term SAP relationships either compound in your favor or quietly sour.
Data quality decides the first impression
Nothing erodes trust in a new SAP deployment faster than a user finding a duplicate customer record or a stale price list in week one. Data quality work is unglamorous, and it's also the single highest-leverage activity before go-live.
Budget real time for deduplication and validation — not a two-day script run, but a proper review cycle with the business owners who actually know which records are correct. Teams that skip this step spend the first quarter after go-live fielding "the system is wrong" complaints that are actually data problems.
Ask what the next eighteen months look like
A SAP sales cycle focuses on the initial deployment. What happens next — the vendor's product roadmap, upcoming deprecations, pricing changes — rarely comes up unless you ask directly.
Request the public roadmap and ask your account team what's changing in the next three releases that could affect your configuration. Buyers who skip this step are routinely surprised by a "sunset" notice for a feature they built a process around.
Before you sign off on SAP
- Model total cost of ownership over five years, not just the initial project quote.
- Name an integration architecture owner before the first connector gets built.
- Get a security and compliance review scheduled before vendor selection closes, not after.
- Ask for the vendor's public product roadmap and read the next three releases.
- Identify your must-have reports before configuration starts.
None of this is a reason to avoid SAP — it's a reason to go in with eyes open about where the real work happens. The platform rarely fails a project on its own; the surrounding decisions do.
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