Why the Right Assessment is Key to a Successful S/4HANA Migration

Change is hard. Especially when it involves your company’s core ERP system—the backbone of your operations. If you are running SAP ECC, you have been hearing about SAP S/4HANA for almost a decade and have at least thought about making the transition. It’s a big move—one that promises real-time analytics, simplified processes, and a future-proof system. But, like any large-scale transformation, it comes with its share of challenges. You have a system that’s been running for years, filled with customizations, integrations, and mountains of data. The transformation will affect everything from your core processes to your bottom line.

Knowing you want to migrate is one thing, and figuring out how to do it without disrupting your business is another. Some companies hesitate, not because they don’t see the value, but because they don’t know where to start. Their systems have been running for years, filled with layers of custom code, deeply integrated third-party applications, and vast amounts of historical data. How much of it will work in S/4HANA? How much will break? What needs to be rewritten, and what can be left behind?

Without answers to these questions and more, many businesses find themselves stuck, delaying the move simply because the unknown feels too risky and the benefits are unclear. The solution is to start with an assessment that provides clarity amid uncertainty. A comprehensive readiness assessment gives businesses a realistic picture of benefits, costs, timelines, and effort required, allowing them to plan their migration with confidence.

CeleRITE Assessment: A Comprehensive Approach to S/4HANA Migration Readiness

A successful S/4HANA migration starts with understanding where you stand today. The CeleRITE assessment provides a structured, in-depth evaluation of an organization's current SAP ECC system, identifying key risks, dependencies, and opportunities before the transition begins. The assessment unfolds in a series of carefully designed steps, each addressing a crucial aspect of migration planning.

1. Understanding the Current State

The CeleRITE assessment journey begins by connecting CeleRITE to a recent copy of your production system. This step focuses on gathering system data across five dimensions including custom code, business processes, data, integrations, and security. Current system landscape data is also collected. By understanding how the current system operates, CeleRITE helps identify inefficiencies, outdated customizations, and areas that require optimization before migration. This fact-based approach eliminates assumptions and provides a strong foundation for planning the next steps.

2. Identify Migration Challenges

Once the system’s current state is mapped out, CeleRITE assesses how prepared it is for S/4HANA. This includes analyzing custom objects to determine what can be retained or reworked, identifying data quality issues, and evaluating third-party system integrations. It will also determine any mandatory changes required in the migration to S/4. Finally, it examines system performance, security risks, and compliance factors. This comprehensive analysis builds confidence in that the scope of the effort is understood and ensures that businesses are aware of potential roadblocks before migration begins. This step provides critical insights into what changes need to be made to ensure a smooth transition.

3. Strategy & Roadmap Development

After assessing every dimension of the migration CeleRITE builds a data-driven migration strategy, outlining the optimal migration approach—whether Greenfield, Brownfield, or a Hybrid model. CeleRITE delivers a clear, strategic roadmap tailored to the organization’s needs followed by a prioritized action plan that highlights key automation opportunities, technical optimizations, and process improvements. It also provides realistic estimates of costs and timelines, allowing organizations to align their migration plans with business objectives and resource availability. This step provides the best strategy and project plan to ensure the foundation necessary to launch a successful migration program.

4. Business Benefits, Actionable Insights & Recommendations

A well-defined business case is essential for justifying the investment in a S/4HANA migration. With approach, timeline, and costs in hand, the next step ensures all of the real benefits and potential benefits have been identified. Our customers will have all of the ingredients to create a business case to justify the project to leadership. CeleRITE will provide insights that empower businesses to evaluate which benefits are important and which might be deferred to a continuous improvement project. This exercise will help reduce costs, minimize risk, and accelerate their migration journey. CeleRITE also addresses the human side of transformation, offering training and change management recommendations to ensure user adoption and employees equipped for the new system.

What Can You Gain from a CeleRITE Assessment?

The real value of an assessment lies in its ability to translate fact-based insights into a clear, strategic roadmap for a seamless migration. An 8-week CeleRITE assessment delivers comprehensive documentation, covering business case justification, cost estimates, timelines, and key recommendations for custom code, data migration, security, integration, and configuration optimization. By analyzing system landscapes, business processes, security, and configurations, CeleRITE identifies inefficiencies, impacted operations, and opportunities for standardization. Every aspect is assessed to ensure no element is overlooked. Stakeholder workshops align IT and business priorities, shaping a migration strategy that minimizes risk and maximizes value. The result is a structured, actionable plan tailored for a smooth S/4HANA transition.

• Business Benefits Backed by Data: A CeleRITE assessment will identify operational efficiencies, cost savings, and opportunities to apply new technologies such as AI and Machine Learning. By aligning IT and business objectives, it helps secure stakeholder buy-in and ensures migration efforts are strategically justified.
• A Migration Approach Tailored to Your Needs: CeleRITE evaluates system complexity, business processes, and long-term goals to determine the best migration strategy. Whether Greenfield, Brownfield, or Hybrid, it ensures a structured transition that aligns with organizational needs.
• A Clear Migration Plan with Cost and Timeline Estimates: CeleRITE delivers a detailed roadmap outlining projected costs, realistic timelines, and resource allocation. This structured approach minimizes uncertainties, prevents delays, and ensures a well-executed migration.
• Optimized Custom Code Strategy: CeleRITE streamlines the transition to S/4HANA by analyzing the entire custom code landscape, determining what to retain, modify, or replace. The assessment identifies active and obsolete RICEFW objects, prioritizes remediation, and accelerates changes with AI-driven automation. Impact analysis highlights high-risk elements, while cleanup recommendations reduce technical debt and enhance system performance.
• Streamlined Custom Configuration Process: CeleRITE analyzes enterprise configurations to assess active and inactive company codes, business functions, and processes across key functional areas. The assessment identifies impacted processes, evaluates RICEFW components, and flags opportunities for standardization. By reviewing configuration changes and cloned transactions, CeleRITE highlights areas for optimization, ensuring alignment with S/4HANA requirements.
• A Low-Risk Data Migration Approach: CeleRITE strengthens data integrity by analyzing, cleansing, and optimizing records across customer, vendor, general ledger, and material master data. The assessment identifies inactive, duplicate, and obsolete entries, determining what needs to be retained, archived, or remediated. By eliminating redundancies and improving data quality, CeleRITE ensures a structured, efficient migration that minimizes disruption and enhances system performance.
• Access Control & Security Compliance: CeleRITE evaluates access control structures to identify inactive, redundant, and incompatible roles. The assessment analyzes composite and single roles, highlights opportunities for consolidation, and flags those requiring remediation. It also detects security risks such as outdated permissions, excessive privileges, inactive user accounts, and segregation of duties (SOD) conflicts. By streamlining role assignments and enforcing best practices, CeleRITE helps organizations reduce FUE counts, strengthen security, enhance compliance, and ensure a clean, efficient migration.
• Seamless Integration & Infrastructure Planning: CeleRITE evaluates the integration landscape, analyzing interfaces across SAP PI/PO, legacy middleware, and direct connections. The assessment identifies dependencies, flags outdated integrations, and provides structured migration paths to modern platforms. By aligning integration efforts with S/4HANA migration phases, CeleRITE minimizes disruption, optimizes connectivity, and ensures system continuity.

Conclusion

The success of any major transformation lies in how well it is planned. Rushing into an S/4HANA migration without a thorough understanding of system complexities, business impact, and potential risks can lead to costly missteps. A CeleRITE assessment sets the foundation for a structured and efficient transition. By evaluating system readiness, custom code, data integrity, and security risks, it provides a complete picture of what needs to be addressed during or before the migration. With the right assessment, you control the outcome. Instead of reacting to problems along the way, you proactively address them before they become roadblocks.