Key Takeaways:
- SAP S/4HANA migrations routinely run over budget and behind schedule, but automation can address many of the hidden complexity drivers.
- AWS and Precisely share seventeen-plus years of combined SAP cloud expertise that directly benefits customers navigating modernization.
- No-code SAP automation lets citizen developers drive efficiency at scale — before, during, and after migration.
If you’re in the middle of an ECC to S/4HANA journey, or just starting to think about one, you already know it’s not simple. What surprises a lot of organizations is just how many of the hard parts aren’t the ones they planned for.
I recently had a great conversation with Sneha Vankamamidi, Senior Manager for Partner Solutions Architecture at AWS, as part of a webinar we did together on accelerating SAP modernization in the cloud — and specifically, how automating the S/4HANA migration can address some of the hardest parts of that journey.
We covered a lot of ground: the pressures CIOs are navigating right now, the importance of partnerships like those between AWS, SAP, Precisely, and how automation fits into the modernization equation in ways that go beyond the obvious.
A few things from that conversation have been on my mind since, and I want to share them here.
Why So Many SAP Programs Run Over Budget and Behind Schedule
The headline statistics are sobering. Research from Horváth found that about 60% of SAP modernization and migration programs are either delayed, over budget, or both. ASUG data puts the average migration timeline at one and a half to two years, with some organizations taking up to six.
I’ve seen that upper range play out firsthand. I spoke recently with a company migrating eight ECC systems into a single S/4HANA instance. Two were legacy systems from their parent company and went relatively smoothly. The other six were acquired systems — each with different data structures, custom transactions, and processes. That’s where the time went.
What these numbers reflect is both technical and organizational complexity: multiple systems with different data models, years of customizations that don’t translate cleanly, and the very real challenge of keeping business running while transformation is underway. Add to that the pressure to adopt AI (even as the foundation for AI — clean, trusted data — is still being built), and the weight on CIOs right now is significant.
The good news is that some of those hidden complexity drivers are exactly where automation can help.
What Nearly Two Decades of AWS-SAP Partnership Means for Your Migration
One of the things Sneha covered that I always find genuinely impressive is the depth of the AWS-SAP relationship. This isn’t a recent partnership of convenience — it goes back to 2008, and since then, AWS and SAP have worked through nearly every hard problem in enterprise cloud migration together: proving reliability, simplifying deployments, building a global partner ecosystem, and now co-innovating on AI.
What that history means in practice is that AWS has solved a lot of the hard problems before customers have to encounter them:
- The first cloud to offer SAP-certified 32TB HANA instances.
- A 30% performance improvement for analytical workloads when SAP migrated HANA Cloud to AWS Graviton processors.
- The IDC finding that SAP customers running S/4HANA on AWS experienced 58% fewer productivity losses from unplanned outages versus their prior on-premises setups.
That’s also the context in which the Precisely partnership sits. As Sneha put it: “Partnerships between AWS, SAP, and partners like Precisely have been so transformative for our customers.”
When you combine the infrastructure and cloud depth AWS brings with Precisely’s specialized expertise in SAP data integrity and automation, the result is a more complete foundation for SAP modernization — one that addresses not just where your workloads run, but whether your data and processes are ready to run well there.
“Our partnership with Precisely is so powerful for your SAP modernization journey. When you combine AWS’s proven cloud platform with Precisely’s specialized data expertise, you get the foundation for successful SAP transformation that delivers real business value.”
Sneha Venkammaedi
Senior Manager for Partner Solutions Architecture, AWS
Does Your S/4HANA Migration Have a Data Problem You Haven’t Accounted For?
Here’s one of the most common things I see organizations underestimate: the data work that has to happen in parallel with the migration itself.
When you move from ECC to S/4HANA, you’re migrating a system and data. And the data quality issues that were manageable in ECC don’t disappear. In many cases, they get harder to work around, because S/4HANA is designed for SAP’s Clean Core approach.
SAP is pushing organizations hard to reduce custom transactions and move toward standardized processes. That’s the right direction, but it means cleaning up years of customizations before they can follow you into the new environment.
A material master record in SAP has around 300 data elements on average. Creating one involves six to eight steps across multiple parts of an organization. When you’re migrating tens of thousands of those records — and simultaneously managing mixed UI environments where your users are switching between SAP GUI, Fiori, and the web GUI — the data complexity multiplies quickly.
The organizations that handle this well treat data quality as part of the migration, not something to address afterward. That means validating data at the point of entry, not catching errors downstream after they’ve compounded.
How No-Code Automation Changes the SAP Modernization Equation
We’ve been automating SAP processes for over twenty years at Precisely, which gives us a particular perspective on what gets hard — and where automation makes the biggest difference.
The challenge with SAP process automation has historically been that it required deep development expertise: custom ABAP code, expensive consultants, brittle implementations that were hard to update when processes changed. What the no-code/low-code approach changes is who can build and maintain those automations.
Citizen developers — the people who actually live in these processes every day — are often the ones who understand them best. When they’re the ones building and maintaining automations, you get faster deployment, faster iteration, and better outcomes because the institutional knowledge is built in.
The results we’ve seen bear that out.
- One energy drink company went from a highly manual, spreadsheet-driven product launch process to cutting their time to market for new products by 50 to 75% — while simultaneously expanding into new markets and multiplying their supply chain complexity.
- Dorman, an auto parts company, reduced the cost and time to update material records by 90%. A company with 1.25 million B2B customers cut the time to create a customer record from 144 hours to six.
None of these results required specialized development teams. They were driven by business users who understood the process and could configure automations to fit it.
Why Cloud Deployment Matters for SAP Automation
Running automation in the cloud changes the calculus for IT in a few meaningful ways.
- It reduces the infrastructure burden on internal teams — no need to manage the automation environment separately from the rest of your cloud footprint.
- It enables centralized script management with proper audit trails, which is increasingly important as governance requirements tighten.
- And it scales with you, rather than requiring infrastructure investments to match demand.
When Automate Studio and Automate Evolve run on AWS, the benefits of the underlying platform — reliability, security, performance — carry through to the automation layer.
Sneha mentioned that AWS infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than on-premises equivalents, and that customers can achieve up to 99% lower carbon footprint. For organizations with sustainability commitments, that’s increasingly part of the migration ROI calculation.
What SAP Business Data Cloud Opens Up for Automation
One of the more interesting threads in our conversation was around SAP Business Data Cloud and what it means for the future of automation.
SAP has historically been a fairly closed data environment. That’s changing with BDC, which is designed to centralize SAP and third-party data into curated data products that are accessible for analytics and AI. Sneha described BDC as “a catalyst” — one that’s helping customers see AWS as a platform for transformation, not just a place to run existing workloads.
From the automation side, this is a meaningful development. As BDC matures, it creates the integration pathways for automation to reach beyond SAP into other cloud-based systems — something we’re actively building toward. The combination of clean SAP data, open integration, and no-code automation is precisely the kind of foundation that makes AI-powered processes viable, rather than aspirational.
The SAP Modernization Journey Doesn’t End at Go-Live
The goal isn’t just to get to S/4HANA. It’s to be in a position where your SAP environment is efficient, your data is trusted, and your team can respond to business change faster than they could before.
That’s where the partnership between AWS and Precisely is designed to meet you — for the migration and beyond. The cloud infrastructure, the automation layer, and the data integrity capabilities all compound over time. Organizations that invest in them during the migration tend to be the ones that actually see the business agility they were promised when the program started.
If you’re navigating ECC to S/4HANA and want to see what this looks like in practice, I’d encourage you to watch our full webinar, Accelerating SAP S/4HANA with Cloud Automation on AWS, where Sneha and I go deeper on all of these topics.
And if you want to get hands-on with SAP process automation, try Automate Studio free for 30 days — no deep SAP development experience required.
