8 Essential Questions That Help SAP Leaders Ensure a Successful Transformation

Transforming from SAP ECC to S/4HANA—or upgrading between S/4HANA versions—is one of the most critical projects your business will undertake. Yet too often, organizations focus on timelines and tools before asking the questions that truly determine success.

This guide outlines the eight essential questions every SAP business and IT leader must ask their partners before starting a transformation or upgrade. The answers you get reveal whether your program will be fast, stable, and future-ready—or costly, disruptive, and unpredictable.

Most SAP leaders rely on system integrators or SAP’s ecosystem partners to manage their journey—but not all partners are equally equipped to handle the complexities of custom code.

Inside this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Identify whether a partner can analyze and transform your custom code accurately.
• Uncover risks that could cause downtime, overruns, or instability later.
• Assess how partners manage technical debt and ensure regulatory compliance in industries like Pharma.
• Evaluate whether partners can provide full visibility and documentation across your codebase—including inventory, usage, and risk scoring.
• Compare different approaches to timelines, cost predictability, and ROI for custom code modernization.
• Understand why fixing only “critical” issues can leave your systems exposed for years to come.

Each question includes specific guidance on what to ask, what to look for in a response, and how automation from smartShift delivers measurable results.

• CIOs and IT Leaders planning an ECC to S/4HANA transformation.
• SAP Program Directors managing upgrade initiatives or multi-system landscapes.
• Enterprise Architects and CoE Teams evaluating partner capabilities.

Business Leaders in Regulated Industries who need validated, compliant custom code.

1. How leading organizations analyze and address millions of lines of custom code before go-live.
2. How to minimize business disruption and stay synchronized between ECC and S/4HANA.
3. How to reduce technical debt and modernize legacy code for future upgrades.
4. Why full visibility and automated documentation are critical to maintaining SAP agility.
5. How to evaluate cost, predictability, and ROI in custom code remediation.

Why fixing all code issues—not just critical ones—is essential for stability.