Protective claim

On the S/4 price list, there is a flat rate item for SAP existing customers at 9000 euros. After a one-time payment, the ERP/ECC 6.0 and S/7 (SAP Business Suite 7) owner may equip all his existing users with new S/4 licenses.

A generous offer from SAP, after the sword of Damocles still hung over the community last fall that S/4 could only be acquired by relicensing all ERP users. The DSAG user association protested against this and was apparently heard in Walldorf. Now a contribution of 9,000 euros has to be paid.

What does the existing SAP customer get in return?

Not even SAP itself knows that for sure. There is an informative document called "Simplification List for SAP S/4 Hana, on-premise edition 1511", but already the first sentence is the perfect protective assertion:

Here it is defined that S/4 is in no way any successor of any SAP ERP system. What this ultimately means is that SAP can send any software it wants to the servers after paying the 9000 euros, but whether the existing and well-known ERP functions will still work is an open question.

In the past, golden R/3 and ECC 6.0 times, numerous functions have been programmed out in Abap - sometimes twice and three times. Thus, today there are several paths in SAP's ERP universe that lead to the goal.

Now those responsible in Walldorf have set out to eliminate this "uncontrolled growth". Tidying up is the order of the day in the SAP realm. But which functions should be given priority?

In case one decommissions the "wrong" function, that protective claim that S/4 is not a successor to anything was introduced as a precaution. This means that S/4 could also be an empty vessel and SAP would still be on the safe side legally.

Existing SAP customers now have no choice but to guess which function will survive and which parts of the old ERP will be decommissioned. A circumstance that has already led to vociferous criticism from DSAG.

How is a project plan for the S/4 release change to be created under these circumstances? A first point of reference can of course be the 300-page document mentioned, but whether this is sufficient is doubtful from today's perspective.