Every SAP BI bake-off ends the same way — a feature matrix, a “Gartner says,” and a recommendation that ignores the two variables that actually decide whether the rollout survives contact with 3,000 users: what it costs when a non-SAP tool reads SAP data, and how long people will wait for a chart to render.
If your BW/4HANA roadmap still says “we’re fine until 2040,” you’ve mixed up two different clocks — and only one of them is actually yours to set.
Every RISE or GROW business case buries a second, unpriced decision: where governed meaning ends and open-ended data science begins. In February 2025, SAP quietly changed the answer — and getting the boundary wrong is how you spend 2027 re-platforming the thing you just built.
Phase 2 waves keep lowering the VAT-turnover threshold, and each targeted taxpayer gets roughly six months’ notice. Here is how the wave mechanism works, what integration actually requires, and why clean-core SAP is the difference between a configuration event and a re-implementation.
The questions AMS buyers most want answered — what should this cost, what SLA is realistic, what seniority mix should I demand — are the questions the market answers least honestly. We are not going to quote you a fabricated benchmark. We are going to show you how to test everyone else’s.
Support models rarely fail at go-live. They fail in AMS month two — when the implementation team’s tacit knowledge has walked out the door and the SLA that looked fine on paper meets the real ticket mix. The transition is a design problem, and it has to be solved before go-live.
Programs that nail design still miss go-live dates — because cutover was treated as logistics for “the last weekend.” Cutover is an evidence discipline: the rehearsals and reconciliations are what authorize go-live. Here is what SAP actually specifies, and what is program-specific judgment dressed up as a benchmark.
“Lift GRC to S/4HANA” is the wrong mental model. The Fiori role model changes what a role *is* — catalogs, spaces and pages, a UI/data split — which changes what your SoD ruleset actually measures. Redesign them together, or your first S/4HANA audit will find the gap.
The purchase-to-pay flow you know from ECC mostly survives the move to S/4HANA. The foundation under it does not. Business Partner and CVI, one inventory table instead of twenty-six, Ariba as the buying front door, and clean-core extensibility — here is what genuinely changes, and what doesn’t.