S/4Hana in 2026: Three ways to move off SAP ECC

Twinings Ovaltine: Deploying a ‘clean’ SAP installation

The greenfield “clean” approach that beverages firm Twinings Ovaltine took was discussed in a keynote presentation at the UK & Ireland SAP User Group conference that took place in December 2025.

During the presentation, Sandeep Seeripat, global chief transformation and technology officer at Twinings Ovaltine, spoke about the rationale for upgrading, in terms of achieving business benefits that are not possible with the legacy ERP system.

If the platform we are looking at does not help accelerate innovation, then why do it?

“If the platform we are looking at does not help accelerate innovation, then why do it?” he asked delegates during a presentation, which looked at how the company used an out-of-the-box implementation of SAP Rise, limiting the number of customisations it needed to make.

For Twinings Ovaltine, the brownfield option, whereby the new ERP system is implemented to provide the same functionality as the system it replaces, was not an option.

He said the company wanted to move to a platform that could support its goals to meet the demands of its customers in terms of quality, experience and more innovative products.

The company’s migration journey involved standardising 10 different ERP systems, which could then be operated securely using good-quality data.

The company selected the standard implementation of SAP on Rise, deployed across multiple countries. “The fact I’m most proud of is that there are two customisations across my entire environment,” Seeripat told delegates.

What this means, he said, is that SAP programme leaders need to have a clear understanding of who in the business has veto rights that could impact the programme. “When things go wrong, who has the final say?” he added.

QD Group: Building on an ECC implementation

Retailer QD Group is an example of a company that began the migration as a brownfield implementation, where the new system initially replicated the same functionality that was available previously in ECC.

Simon Bacon, SAP operations manager at QD Group, is responsible for the day-to-day running of SAP,  including the development and deployment of SAP Fiori applications. Most recently, he was the project lead for the company’s move to S4/Hana, overseeing the project in 2025. “We agreed on a number of primary objectives. The key one was that we would have no business disruption,” he said.

Rather than just going full on just to make it look nice, we are focusing on key business outcomes

Unlike Twinings Ovaltine, this meant the company could not run with a vanilla implementation of SAP without any customisation. “We wanted to keep downtime to a minimum and keep the training requirement and change management to a bare minimum,” he said. “The new standard SAP system would have disrupted our business because of the change management.”

This led to the decision to embark on a brownfield migration, meaning that when the system eventually went live, what business users saw appeared to be the enterprise system they were already accustomed to, even though the core enterprise system had been upgraded.

“One of the key objectives was to come up with a clear transformation plan straight after go-live,” said Bacon. 

Three weeks after the initial implementation went into production, there were no problems, according to Bacon. “We were on time, on budget, and we had no incidents,” he said.

The company agreed on a list of 10 key strategic objectives for the project to achieve in 2026. These included modernisation of the user interface and making use of S4/Hana and SAP Fiori applications. “Rather than just going full on with that just to make it look nice, we are focusing on key business outcomes,” he added.

Historically, QD managed stock using reorder point planning, which means stock is reordered once levels fall below a certain threshold. As such, there is no predictive capability. While such functionality is possible with the latest SAP software, implementation requires a significant change to the business process. “We wouldn't get approval to put in a whole new way of changing replenishment without complete buy-in and support from the business,” said Bacon. 

The team at QD needed to understand how the algorithms work to achieve greater granularity of data. “We’re building two custom Fiori applications with robotic process automation [RPA] in the background to automate the SAP activities,” he said.

The RPA was needed due to the greater level of data granularity the business required, which complicated the business process. “What we need to do is simplify it by building applications that automate the process.”

Bacon said the change to the replenishment process is an initial step. “Once that foundation for forecasting and replenishment is in place, is tried, tested and trusted, that’s when we’ll be in a stronger position to leverage some of the newer capabilities of S4/Hana, and we can start looking at artificial intelligence (AI) use cases.”

For instance, he said there are now several agentic AI use cases for replenishment and forecasting, but they are not ready yet for QD to deploy, which means Bacon and the team are taking a pragmatic approach by getting the building blocks in place and the fundamentals right before rushing down the road with all the new features SAP has to offer.

Imperial Brands: A data-centric approach

A focus on data was required by tobacco company Imperial Brands as part of its SAP upgrade.

Having grown through acquisition, Imperial Brands found itself relying on around 50 different ERP systems, which were not truly integrated. The company wanted to combine these legacy ERP systems in a single S4/Hana instance.

Our ambition was to design a global template, keeping the core clean

Gunnar Glasneck is the data workstream lead at Imperial Brands. In a podcast recorded at the UKISUG conference in December 2025, Glasneck said he was focusing on the implementation of the company’s SAP analytical cloud, a project that involved working with users in different regions to help them cleanse and map legacy data in preparation for the S/4Hana migration.

Imperial Brands’ S/4Hana journey began in 2022 with a business initiative called Unify. It selected two key sites – the UK and a major manufacturing facility in Poland – as the first areas in which to deploy the new system.

When asked why these sites were selected rather than piloting in less critical parts of the business, Glasneck said: “Our ambition was to design a global template, keeping the core clean. If you start with a simple factory, with perhaps two or three production lines, or a simple market, then you won’t be in a position to build a global template, or at least have a sufficiently advanced template which can then be rolled out to the other markets and factories.”

The team comprised a blend of people hand-picked from the business who knew the legacy systems and local processes, combined with a strong drive to optimise and standardise processes. These people worked with external S/4Hana experts provided by a systems integrator.

Glasneck said the company put in place a strong governance structure, which stipulated that the processes are owned by the business.

The data migration journey began with local teams that were briefed on how the project would run, profiling the legacy data and the tasks that needed to be done. “This enabled us to understand the legacy data, and enabled the local business to cleanse the data and do a mapping exercise, which was documented and handed over to our data partner, Syniti,” said Glasneck.

The profiling and cleansing of the data was a key factor in Imperial Brands’ successful S/Hana deployment, which required people in the business to take ownership of their data. But, as Glasneck noted, this was the toughest aspect of the project. It involved blending capable people from the business with functional consultants and analysts.

“I selected three business people who are at ease with data,” he said. But this can be a challenge. “The topic of data ownership is difficult to implement if you don’t have a data culture,” he added.

Migrating in 2026

These three examples demonstrate that there is no way to do an S/4Hana implementation that works for every organisation. The simplest method is to run the new system as is, with no customisation. But while this approach delivers the latest SAP features, it requires changes to the way the business works.

For this reason, some organisations may decide to implement the new system as a replica of the system it replaces. Such an approach is unlikely to deliver new business benefits, but it simplifies the implementation and reduces change management. IT leaders taking this approach will need to have a strategy to roll out additional functionality in stages, to take advantage of what S/4Hana has to offer.

The third approach, also known as a bluefield implementation, involves a new roll-out of S/4Hana followed by selective data migration, potentially reducing the change management load. Given the 2027 SAP ECC end-of-support deadline, the majority of organisations embarking on an implementation of S4/Hana this year are likely to adopt one of these strategies.