Ten years of S/4HANA migrations. Six finance transformations. Three patterns that repeat.
Most SAP programmes do not fail because the tool is wrong. They fail because three questions were never answered before the first workshop was booked.
Not "which modules do we need" or "what is the rollout sequence" or "who is the system integrator". Those are downstream questions. The upstream ones rarely make it to the agenda.
Three questions every SAP programme should answer — before kickoff:
• Decision logic. Which decisions should the new system actually support? Forecast revisions? Investment approvals? Cashflow scenarios? "Better reporting" is not an answer. The answer is a list of decisions, and the data architecture follows from there. Most programmes never write this list.
• Governance. Who decides what, on which basis, with what authority — after go-live? The first authorisation workshop usually happens four months into the programme. By then, the decision rights have been informally set by whoever shaped the early data model. Reverse-engineering governance from a half-built system is the most expensive way to design it.
• Reconciliation. What happens when finance and operations produce two different versions of the same number? Every SAP programme creates this situation. The ones that succeed have a defined reconciliation logic before the first integration test. The ones that struggle treat each reconciliation as a one-off ticket.
These three questions do not require a system integrator. They do not require a licence decision. They require a steering conversation between Finance, IT, and the business sponsor — three to four meetings, before the contract is signed.
Programmes that answer these questions before kickoff move faster afterwards. Programmes that skip them spend the next eighteen months building the answers in production.
The tool is never the problem. The architecture above the tool is.
Where would your current SAP programme answer "yes — we have decided that"?
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C
Helping finance and programme leaders build steering logic that works.