Choosing your S/4HANA path: greenfield, brownfield, or selective
Three paths, three different bets
Greenfield means a fresh S/4HANA build on SAP Best Practices, leaving legacy customization behind. Brownfield means a technical conversion of your existing ECC system, carrying its configuration and custom code forward. Selective data transition sits between the two — moving specific company codes, ledgers or business units on your own timeline. Each is a legitimate strategy; none is universally correct.
The technical criteria matter — data volume, custom code footprint, add-on compatibility — but they rarely decide the outcome by themselves. The decisive factor is usually organizational: how much process change the business can absorb in a single cutover, and how much appetite there is to fix, rather than carry forward, twenty years of accumulated configuration decisions.
Where RISE with SAP fits — and where it doesn't
RISE with SAP bundles infrastructure, license and some tooling into a single commercial construct. It is a legitimate simplification for many organizations, but it is a commercial decision wrapped in a technical one, and the two deserve separate scrutiny. We advise clients independently of the party selling RISE, which is a distinction worth asking about with any advisor on this topic.
The architecture questions — clean core scope, extension strategy, integration footprint — do not change based on whether you buy RISE. Deciding them first, then evaluating RISE against that architecture, produces better outcomes than the reverse order.
How we scope the decision
We start with a fit-to-standard assessment against your current processes, cross-referenced with a custom code usage analysis, before proposing a path. That combination tells you two things at once: how far your organization has drifted from SAP standard, and how much of that drift is actually delivering business value worth preserving.