SAP S/4HANA business case and ROI assessment — a number your finance function can defend
Most S/4HANA business cases are built on someone else’s figures. They survive the steering committee and fall apart in front of the CFO, because nobody can say where the numbers came from or which of them would still hold if the assumptions moved.
We build the case from your estate instead. Measured code and data position, costed migration paths, and a clear line between the savings you can calculate and the upside you can only argue for.
A costed, dated business case with every assumption written down next to the number it produces.
How we build your business case
Four steps. The output is a figure you own and can be argued with, not one you have to take on trust.
Measure the estate, do not estimate it
Custom code volume, data footprint, interface count, modification depth and licence position, read from your system. Most cost overruns on a conversion trace back to a code and data position nobody measured before signing.
Size the paths honestly
Brownfield conversion, greenfield build and selective transition, each costed against what your estate actually carries — including the option you would rather not hear about.
Separate defensible from directional
Licence, infrastructure, support and run-cost changes are calculable and belong in the base case. Revenue and productivity upside is real but attributable only in part, so we present it separately rather than blending it into a single headline.
Put a dated plan against it
A business case with no delivery plan behind it is a forecast. The output is a costed sequence with the risks named and the decision points marked.
What the published industry study reports
Forrester Consulting modelled a composite organisation from interviews with four SAP S/4HANA customers and a survey of 110 IT decision makers. Three-year, risk-adjusted, at a 10% discount rate.
On the survey side, 88% of respondents said S/4HANA helped their organisation deploy new capabilities, 88% reported improved visibility into their data sets, and 84% said it helped expand existing offerings or enable new ones.
Read the full study (PDF) — The Total Economic Impact™ Of SAP S/4HANA, commissioned by SAP and delivered by Forrester Consulting, September 2019.
Three things to say out loud before you quote 134%
None of these invalidate the study. They are the questions a finance function asks immediately, and it is better to have answered them yourself than to be asked them in the room.
Roughly 88% of the modelled benefit rests on assumed business outcomes, not on measurable IT cost reduction. Two lines carry it: benefit from functionality enabled by S/4HANA, at $25.2M in present value, and increased customer retention at $8.4M, together 88% of the $38.2M total. Neither is an IT saving. The first is modelled as revenue uplift converted to profit at an assumed 12% margin; the second as a reduction in the cost of customer turnover. Both are credible and both are assumptions — which is precisely the part a finance committee will test first.
It was published in September 2019. It therefore pre-dates RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP, and the maintenance deadline that drives most conversions today: SAP provides mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7 to the end of 2027, with optional extended maintenance to the end of 2030 at a premium. The benefit categories in the study have aged well; the cost side reflects a licensing and infrastructure model many organisations are no longer buying.
The composite organisation is a construct, not a customer. Forrester synthesised it from four interviews and a 110-company survey, and risk-adjusted the benefit lines downward by 5% to 15%. It is a sound method and a transparent one — it is simply not a company whose starting position resembles yours in any specific way.
Signals you need your own number
Organisations we have delivered SAP S/4HANA for
Almarai · Jamjoom Pharma · Northern Region Cement Company · Dal Group
SAP Gold Partner · SAP-ranked Expert in S/4HANA Cloud
Background reading, and what comes after the decision
The analyst studies below are summarised elsewhere on this site. The assessment is the step between reading them and committing to a programme.
Get a number you can defend
Tell us what you are running today and what is forcing the change. We will come back with the migration paths that genuinely apply to your estate, what each would cost, and which parts of the benefit case will survive a finance review — before anyone talks about a statement of work.
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