S/4HANA readiness, for the business team — not just IT.
Most S/4HANA guidance is written for the programme office and the technical migration team. If you run Finance, Sales, Supply Chain or HR, you are still on the hook for readiness — and it is rarely clear where your part of the work actually starts.
This page is a curated route through what we've published on that question: understand the real timeline, decide what your team can own without a consultant, get your data in order, prepare your people and processes, and do the prep well once you start. Each step links to the fuller article.
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Step 1
Understand the timeline
Start here if "the 2027 deadline" is the extent of what you've been told. Mainstream maintenance for the core SAP Business Suite 7 software ends on 31 December 2027 — but the picture is staged, not a single cliff edge, and knowing the real shape of it changes how you plan.
The 2027 deadline, accurately: what's really ending, and when -
Step 2
Decide what your team can own
Not every part of an upgrade needs a consultant's day rate — a migration consultant typically bills $800–$1,200 a day, and a lot of what sits inside that number is not deep technical work. These two articles set out a clear-eyed split of what Finance, Sales, Supply Chain and HR can genuinely carry themselves, and where the maths on external help actually changes.
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Step 3
Get your data ready
Migrations rarely fail on the technology — they fail on the data: duplicates, gaps and inconsistencies that surface too late to fix cheaply. Here's how to get ahead of it before it becomes a go-live risk.
Data readiness: the quiet thing that derails S/4HANA projects -
Step 4
Prepare your people and processes
Tools like SAP Signavio and the new Joule AI agents are genuinely capable — but they live with your transformation team and, in Joule's case, only land after go-live. Your people and processes still need their own preparation, on a timeline that doesn't wait for either.
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Step 5
Do the prep well — the method
Once your team starts using AI for readiness work, how you prompt it decides whether the output is usable or just an interesting conversation. These two set out why structured prompting beats ad-hoc chat, and why that gap widens rather than closes as AI agents get more capable.
Put the method to work
The free starter toolkit is a structured, four-prompt readiness assessment you run in your own AI tool — the same standard of build as the paid packs, at no cost.