S/4 Hana or not?

Two camps are emerging: For one group of companies, SAP's new product generation is of strategic importance. They see innovation potential for transforming their business processes and building new business models.

The representatives of the other group regard S/4 Hana merely as SAP's next release to be introduced. They are not convinced of the added value that the new application system can offer them.

Therefore, their main concern is a smooth technical migration of current systems to S/4 Hana. These are the key findings of the PAC study "SAP S/4 Hana".

41 percent have concrete plans to implement SAP S/4 Hana in the next few years or are already in the project (14 percent).

For a quarter of the participants, the introduction of the system is not yet an issue at all today.

In 2015, only two percent of companies were in a corresponding implementation project and around one third considered the topic irrelevant.

Among the reasons they cite for implementation are accelerating processes and data analysis (88 percent), modernizing their SAP applications (72 percent), and process transformation toward real-time (70 percent).

However, not everyone associates the potential that a switch could hold - 63 percent of respondents say SAP's product strategy forces them to adopt it.

"It is advisable for SAP users to have the innovation potential that S/4 Hana can offer demonstrated for their own company," says Frank Niemann, the author of the study.

Purely technical migration preferred

Almost ast half (49 percent) of the companies participating in the study are planning a step-by-step technical migration to S/4 Hana. Only 24 percent also want to transform their processes step by step.

Just as many are more likely to pursue a complete reimplementation.

38 percent would first like to bring SAP Business Suite onto Hana in order to switch to S/4 Hana at a later date (by comparison, 48 percent wanted to take this intermediate step last year).

At 37 percent, a similarly strong group prefers the direct S/4 Hana transformation in one step.

The target platform is usually the on-premise edition. Unclear effort, lack of business case and costs are the three top obstacles in the introduction of S/4 Hana.

Many companies are unsure how extensive an implementation will be. Often, there is a lack of a convincing business case that would justify the switch.

Since companies have to purchase new licenses for S/4 Hana, many of the respondents see another obstacle in the cost of software acquisition.

This means that the same top obstacles are named as in the 2015 survey.

Concerns about the degree of maturity are also only marginally lower than a year ago. In contrast, the assessment that modifications can make implementation more difficult has decreased.