Executive Clarity · Cross-cutting

Five Risks of an S/4HANA Transformation

The failure modes are known, documented and interlinked. What varies is whether a programme has a governed answer for each — before it needs one.

The question

Which of the five documented transformation risks is most likely to hit your programme first — and does your governance already contain a specific, owned response to it?

The five risks

The documented facts

  • 1 · Scope creep and changing requirements. Transformation studies (including Horváth's programme analyses) report scope expansion as the main driver of timeline overruns.
  • 2 · Cost overruns and timeline slippage. Survey data on S/4HANA conversions reports a majority of companies exceeding both plan (around 60% reporting planning overruns) and budget (around 55% spending more than estimated). Figures vary by survey; the direction does not.
  • 3 · Data and integration challenges. Poorly managed data transitions and overlapping parallel projects are among the most frequently named technical pitfalls, particularly across ECC, SCM and external-system boundaries.
  • 4 · Change management and user resistance. Reported survey data attributes roughly 62% of S/4HANA project challenges to people issues rather than technology.
  • 5 · Lack of executive support and governance. Programme analyses consistently flag missing top-level governance and misaligned business/IT goals as a primary pitfall.

Inference

The five risks are not independent: scope creep flourishes exactly where executive governance is weak, data problems surface as "user resistance" when nobody explains them, and every overrun is downstream of at least one of the others. A mitigation plan that treats them as five separate checklists misses the system.

Point of view

The endgame is not a completed migration — it is the business benefit the migration was supposed to buy. Programmes that measure only go-live readiness will hit go-live and call it success. Fix scope early, put named executives on governance, invest in data before it embarrasses you, and treat change management as a workstream with a budget, not a communications afterthought.

Conditional, not ideological — the mitigation grid

If

Requirements keep arriving mid-flight

Freeze scope behind a change board with economic sign-off — every addition priced in time and money, decided by the steering committee, not the loudest stakeholder.

If

The plan assumes everything goes right

Re-baseline with contingency and phased delivery; ground the plan in the delivery-model decisions (RISE vs GROW) instead of ambition.

If

Data quality is "IT's problem"

Stand up data governance with business ownership and validate continuously — data surprises at cutover are governance failures with a delay.

If

The organisation hasn't been asked to change yet

Fund change management as a workstream: communication, training, sponsorship. Targeted measures demonstrably turn early resistance around.

Monday-morning questions

  • Who can change our programme scope, and what did the last three changes cost?
  • Which business benefit is the programme accountable for after go-live — by number, by name?
  • When did we last test a real data migration end to end — and what broke?
  • Does the steering committee hear from the people who will use the system, or only from the people building it?

Where this sits

This article cuts across the whole Executive Clarity decision library — each risk has a decision page where it is contained: the timeline in the ECC decision timeline, the delivery model in RISE vs GROW, the discipline in SAP Clean Core strategy.

Sources

  • Horváth transformation-programme studies on scope and governance drivers.
  • Industry surveys on S/4HANA conversion overruns and people-related project challenges (figures as reported; survey populations vary).
  • SAP consultancy analyses of data-migration and integration pitfalls.

Editorial standard: facts, inference and point of view are kept separate above. Published 2026-08-02 · By Andreas BORN.