ERP Implementation
Client side SAP advice for the decisions that matter now: the 2027 ECC deadline, S/4HANA business cases, IS U futures and the honest question of whether SAP is still the right answer. We sell no licences and hold no SAP partnership.
PEF Consulting Partners advises SAP estates from the client side of the table. Our leadership has run large SAP and Microsoft estates, delivered SAP ERP transformation as interim head of transformation at Amber, and worked deep in the utility industry where SAP IS U now faces its forced 2027 decision. Every SAP conversation you will have this year is with someone selling a migration; we are the exception, and that is the point.
The next few years are decision years for SAP customers. Mainstream ECC maintenance ends in 2027 with paid extensions to 2030, S/4HANA is a reimplementation in all but name, and for utilities the IS U question opens the door to platforms like Kraken. These are board level choices dressed up as IT upgrades, and they deserve independent scrutiny before any vendor shapes them.
An honest, costed comparison of your real options: S/4HANA, paid extension, leaving SAP, or third party support, decided from your operating model rather than the licence deadline.
Client side leadership for S/4HANA moves, governed as the full reimplementation they are, with the data, testing and readiness disciplines protected.
For utilities: the stay or leave decision on IS U, informed by delivery experience on both SAP estates and the Kraken platform.
Independent assurance over SAP integrator plans, estimates and change requests, from people who have owned estates of this scale.
SAP work with us comes in two parts. Take one, or both together.
We assure your SAP programme on your behalf, alongside SAP and your systems integrator: the RISE or licence deal, the integrator’s plan and estimates, each quality gate and the cutover decision, with data and custom code checked along the way.
We run the S/4HANA programme from the client side and deliver the integration: interfaces to the systems around SAP, data migration and reconciliation, testing, cutover and hypercare, through to a stable business.
Assurance first is the usual way in. Where it makes sense, the same people then carry the work through as the full integration.
SAP S/4HANA is SAP’s current generation ERP suite, built on the in memory HANA database and offered on premise, in a private cloud or as the public cloud edition. It replaces SAP ECC, whose mainstream maintenance ends in 2027, and it is not an upgrade in the usual sense: the data model, the user interface and many standard processes change, so a migration is governed as a reimplementation whether you take the system conversion, selective data transition or greenfield route.
A SAP S/4HANA migration typically runs from twelve to thirty months depending on the route, the number of company codes and how much custom code has to be retired. The decisions that drive cost are made early: which route, which edition, how clean the data has to be and which customisations are worth carrying. We help clients make those decisions independently of the implementation partner who will profit from them. Utilities face their own version of this decision; see SAP utilities migration.
A short, confidential conversation before the vendor workshop is worth more than any discount negotiated after it. No obligation.