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.
Not certain which target state you are costing? the decision tree that precedes the business case sets out the choices the numbers depend on.
Build the board case with the SAP implementation business-case workbook before selecting a preferred option.
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.
What a finance-ready S/4HANA business case includes
A credible case connects the target operating model to cash flow. It shows the cost of change, the cost of waiting and the range of outcomes—not only a single optimistic return.
Baseline cost of the current estate
Licences, infrastructure, hosting, support, operations, upgrades, interfaces, custom-code maintenance and internal effort are brought into one current-state total cost of ownership.
Full cost of the target state
The model includes subscription or licence costs, implementation, data, integration, testing, change, internal capacity, dual running, contingency, hypercare and the steady-state run cost.
Benefits with accountable owners
Technology savings are separated from working-capital, productivity, cycle-time, compliance and growth benefits. Each benefit has a baseline, method, timing, dependency and business owner.
Scenario and sensitivity analysis
Base, downside and upside cases show which assumptions move the result. Migration route, deployment model, schedule, scope, adoption and benefit realisation can be tested without rebuilding the model.
Investment measures finance can audit
Cash flow, payback, net present value and internal rate of return are calculated from a dated implementation and benefit ramp, with the discount rate and treatment of risk stated explicitly.
Cost of delay and decision gates
The case compares acting now with extending the current estate, compressing the programme later or carrying avoidable run costs. Funding is tied to evidence-based gates, not one irreversible approval.
One model, jointly owned by finance, IT and the business
The strongest S/4HANA cases are not “IT numbers” handed to finance. They are built with the people who own the costs, processes and benefits.
Finance: agrees the baseline, accounting treatment, discount rate, cash-flow view and the evidence required for approval.
Technology: owns the landscape facts, migration effort, architecture, technical debt, security, integration and steady-state operating costs.
Business process owners: validate process measures, adoption dependencies and the benefits that can genuinely be attributed to the programme.
Procurement and commercial teams: test licences, cloud consumption, implementation terms, indexation, exit conditions and vendor assumptions.
Programme leadership: connects the financial model to scope, milestones, resources, risk and the benefit-realisation cadence after go-live.
The decision package you can take to the board
The model is aligned to the delivery choice, not developed in isolation. See how Altivate assesses and executes the programme in our SAP migration services for Saudi Arabia →.
Business-case questions a steering committee will ask
Why not use a vendor ROI benchmark?
Benchmarks help identify benefit categories and a plausible range. They do not know your custom code, data quality, licences, process performance, deployment choice or capacity to realise change. We use external studies as context and your estate as the model.
How do we keep benefits from being double-counted?
Every benefit is tied to one baseline, calculation method, timing profile and accountable owner. Overlap between headcount, productivity, working capital and revenue assumptions is tested explicitly before benefits are aggregated.
Can the model compare RISE, GROW and other deployment options?
Yes. Commercial structures differ, but each option can be compared through the same cash-flow lens: transition cost, recurring cost, internal effort, risk, flexibility and the benefits the operating model can actually support.
What happens to the business case after approval?
It becomes the programme’s value baseline. Costs, assumptions, delivery scope and benefit measures are refreshed at decision gates so the steering committee can act when the evidence changes.
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.
Book a free SAP assessment →
