The challenge. A manufacturing group running SAP ECC across three plants faced a hardware refresh that made staying put as expensive as moving. Leadership wanted S/4HANA — but month-end close could not slip, statutory filings could not slip, and the internal IT team was four people.
The approach. We spent the first four weeks on assessment rather than configuration: custom-code analysis showed just under half the group's custom objects had not executed in a year, and data profiling found the real cleansing burden sat in vendor and material masters, not transactions. That evidence made the route decision straightforward — a brownfield conversion with aggressive retirement of dead code, and master-data cleansing run as a parallel workstream from week one.
The delivery. Two mock conversions were rehearsed and timed before anyone committed to a cutover weekend. Month-end procedures were walked through on the converted sandbox with the finance team a full cycle before go-live. The cutover ran to a scripted runbook that had already worked twice.
The outcome. The group went live on S/4HANA inside nine months. Every close during the programme ran on schedule, the first close on the new system completed without escalation, and the custom-code estate shrank by nearly half. The same team provides AMS support today.
Client identity anonymised; published with client approval.