The team at Quantum Integrators has spent roughly two decades implementing SAP systems. Now the digital transformation firm is focusing that experience on a specific group of customers: midmarket organizations still running SAP ECC that need to plan their move to SAP S/4HANA.

For many of those companies, the move has become harder to postpone. SAP’s mainstream maintenance for ECC expires at the end of 2027, putting a firm date on a decision many organizations have deferred. At the same time, SAP has expanded its portfolio of AI offerings, with S/4HANA as the foundation customers need to leverage.

The migration gives customers a chance to address both concerns together. In our view, SAP once ran about 10 years behind what customers wanted, and it now sits about 10 years ahead of what they are looking for.

To help customers catch up, Quantum Integrators, an SAP PE & Sell partner, offers QNeo, an AI-enabled assessment designed to show midmarket organizations what their migration will involve before they commit to it. QNeo is a resource for customers who know they need to move but aren’t sure where to begin.

Where Midmarket Companies Get Stuck

Midmarket customers tend to run into the same barriers. Organizations have trouble measuring the return they can expect from S/4HANA, and SAP’s licensing options and product catalog are complex, requiring specialized expertise.

Many internal IT teams also lack the bandwidth or S/4HANA experience to plan a transformation. Large consulting firms are one option, but their services can be costly, which leaves many smaller companies struggling and unsure where to turn.

At Quantum Integrators, our focus is on helping those small and midmarket firms get ahead instead of staying stuck in their ways.

What the Assessment Adds

The process starts with a step many SAP customers will recognize. The customer runs RC_COLLECT_ANALYSIS_DATA, the SAP report that collects data for SAP Readiness Check and shares the resulting data files with Quantum Integrators. The data is loaded into QNeo, which generates an initial readiness report within minutes. None of the software is installed on the customer’s system.

The difference lies in what QNeo adds on top of that data. The standard SAP Readiness Check output is largely technical and doesn’t capture the full picture of how an ERP system fits into the rest of the business — and the IT solutions its leveraging.

Quantum Integrators collects additional information about the customer’s broader landscape, including the countries and languages the business operates in and the systems that exchange data with SAP. The assessment also considers reporting structures a migration could disrupt, such as those affected by a move from SAP Business Warehouse to SAP Analytics Cloud. QNeo uses AI to draw on the experience of comparable migrations in the customer’s industry, identifying likely risks along with strategies to mitigate them.

Consultants with experience leading ECC-to‑S/4HANA transformations then review the findings. That human review puts the results in context and aligns them with the customer’s SAP environment. The consultants also hold a workshop with the customer’s stakeholders to arrive at a deployment approach.

The customer receives an executive summary with expert insights, AI-assisted risk mitigation, and a transformation roadmap, which forms the basis for a rough order-of-magnitude estimate of the implementation effort. We are transparent with clients about the risks, challenges, and issues they face.

The executive summary is designed to help CIOs and CFOs make informed decisions about their migration roadmap.

The Custom Code Problem

One risk shows how the assessment works in practice. Many organizations accumulate custom code over years of leveraging ECC, and the amount that needs to be reworked for S/4HANA is often underestimated before a project begins. During the conversion, a backlog of code awaiting adaptation can grow faster than a team can address it. QNeo’s industry data identifies that backlog as typically the largest single risk in that phase.

Customers should scan their custom code usage well before the upgrade window, so the remediation effort is known in advance, and prioritize migration work according to business criticality, and how often the code is used.

QNeo’s dashboard also shows typical timelines. The environment and object preparation phases generally take two to four months, depending on landscape complexity. [NI1] For the technical conversion phase, three to six months is a commonly cited range, though comparable engagements have reported four to nine months, based on custom code volume.

A Foundation for AI

The attention to custom code also connects the migration to what comes after it. Quantum Integrators encourage customers to adopt SAP’s fit-to-standard approach, aligning business processes with standard S/4HANA functionality and keeping custom development to a minimum. This approach allows customers to adopt the prebuilt solutions in SAP Business AI and SAP BDC sooner.

That groundwork established by finalizing this work [NI2] matters because finishing the migration doesn’t resolve every question. We have seen customers who moved to S/4HANA in recent years and still aren’t sure how to begin using AI-enabled analytics and automation. Many feel lost, and even large enterprises are asking questions.

Those questions include what AI tools cost to run, whether they deliver the results a business needs, and which use cases already exist.

For an organization still on ECC, the process starts with understanding the current system, including its connections and custom code. Quantum Integrators encourages customers to consider what the services available on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) can offer while their migration plan is still taking shape. With so many catalogs of services now available on SAP BTP, customers can think through those value drivers as they begin the transformation instead of struggling with them later.