The deadline of 2027 for the end of ECC support and the inevitable move to SAP S/4HANA could be a huge catalyst in the evolution of how SAP change is managed.

Software that automates the tasks and processes around managing SAP change has been available since the turn of the century. Yet, only a small percentage of SAP IT teams use it.

This is a mystery to me, especially when I see almost every SAP IT team experiencing the same limitations and frustrations due to manual task and process management, regardless of the size of their SAP infrastructure.

Even with the drive towards agile development, SAP DevOps, release management, and other recent changes to SAP development, the seeming lack of interest in automation as an enabler is even more surprising.

Yet, the shift to SAP S/4HANA, for many, seems to be triggering the SAP IT team’s interest in transition enabling software, for before and after the migration.

Here are several reasons why!

Firstly, a lengthy ECC to S/4HANA transition means managing a lot of change at once, often, while the legacy system is running, and the SAP S/4HANA landscape is built and tested.

Many SAP IT teams realize that managing change, including Business as Usual (BAU), transitioning and new, with traditional manual processes, will be very difficult at best. But more likely, severely limiting.

Change management automation provides the structure to manage SAP change across multiple SAP environments and systems.

Secondly, a SAP S/4HANA migration provides an excellent opportunity to upgrade many of the traditional SAP IT systems and processes that may have been hard to justify otherwise.

SAP IT teams increasingly are looking beyond the transition and seeing a future need for an IT toolset that will help them deliver DevOps.

Change control automation provides the platform to integrate an end-to-end process enabling DevOps automation.

Finally, whether shifting to SAP S/4HANA now or in the future, SAP IT teams are under pressure to deliver higher volumes of change, faster and with improved quality, to support business needs and initiatives.

An SAP S/4HANA project for many organizations means they will need to look at other ways to manage change than how they do now.

Removing most of the manual tasks and processes SAP IT Teams have been for using for decades, frees teams to develop and deliver change instead of managing the process of change. 

The way forward with S/4HANA!

Why not use your SAP S/4HANA transition thinking process to trigger your thoughts around the value automated SAP change management could deliver to your team?

Here at Rev-Trac, we have helped thousands of SAP IT team members significantly improve the output, response time, and quality of business request SAP change.

Simplify and accelerate your S/4HANA migration

For more information about how we can assist you in automating your change management processes to meet continually changing business demands, visit or request a demo with one of our experts.