SAP S/4HANA Migration: Communication That Protects Your Investment
Turn one of the biggest, riskiest change programs on your IT roadmap into an adoption success story. We help project teams build and execute a culture-right stakeholder engagement plan – that's fast, cost-efficient, and owned by you.
Your Window Is Closing Fast
Here's the reality check: ECC support ends in 30 months. 61% of organizations haven't even started their migration yet. Extended support will cost 2-5x more—if SAP even offers it for your landscape.
Late starters face a dangerous combination: rushed technical implementation plus zero time for proper change management. That's how €50M investments become €80M disasters.
Stakeholder Engagement:
The Hidden Failure Point in S/4HANA Programs
Technical readiness is vital—but it's not everything. The disasters we see most often stem from people problems: misaligned sponsorship across geographies, local managers who don't see "what's in it for me," employees drowning in parallel initiatives, and system language that never translates into day-to-day impacts.
What Succes Looks Like Instead
Organizations with structured stakeholder engagement see a different story: executives who confidently repeat clear value messages, local managers who allocate resources because they understand site-specific benefits, and end users who approach go-live with confidence instead of panic.
The results speak:
47% lower hypercare costs,
30% higher adoption rates,
2x faster productivity recovery.
This isn't luck—it's preparation.
What Communication Failure Costs
When stakeholders aren't prepared, S/4HANA programs bleed money in predictable ways:
€2.3M average in rework cycles because "hidden" workarounds surface too late
6-month project delays when local sites revolt against imposed changes
€1.8M per 1,000 users in extended hypercare costs
3x normal support tickets flooding your helpdesk for months
The most expensive mistake? Up to 50% of your S/4HANA licenses sit unused because people stick to familiar workarounds and shadow systems.
What's your exposure? With 2,000 users at €75,000 average salary, poor adoption puts €960K to €1.54M at immediate risk—and that's just productivity losses, not counting support costs or unused licenses.
Our Solution:
The S/4HANA Change Playbook
Twenty years of SAP transformations distilled into tools your team can use immediately. Instead of generic change management, you get culture-specific approaches that work with how your organization actually makes decisions:
Stakeholder power mapping that reveals real decision-makers (not org chart theory)
Localized value narratives that translate SAP benefits into site-specific language
Adoption tracking systems that catch problems while you can still fix them
Your team owns the capability. We provide the jumpstart.
An approach with impact
90%
of users say they are happy with the way changes are communicated.
87%
technology adoption rate post go-live - far above the typical 30–60% industry average.
50%
faster creation of communication toolkits frees up valuable project team time and gets the message out quicker.
40%
reduction in tickets in the go-live period = happy hypercare teams and tangible ticket cost savings.
Bonus
1-2 fewer FTE’s required within internal comms teams or system implementers to execute comms tasks.
30%
boost in traffic to training sites, thanks to smart, targeted training promotion.
Value at Risk
Without structured stakeholder engagement
Productivity Losses
Support Ticket Costs
Unused License Value
Value Protected with COSYN
Quick ROI Sense-Check
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How we help others:
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Global ECC landscape migrating to cloud S/4. COSYN delivered multi-language stakeholder map, programme brand kit, leadership cascade and country rollout comms.
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COSYN co-built a role-based communication kit and change narrative tied to plant operations KPIs. Local deployment teams produced site packs 30% faster using Playbook templates; executive steering reported higher cross-region alignment and on-time cutover.
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Urgent SAP platform upgrade required synchronised comms to internal labs, production partners & external suppliers. COSYN rapid-response sprint produced targeted impact briefs and compliance notices in 5 languages; post-go-live incident log showed 25% fewer process-clarity escalations vs. prior release wave.
Ready to See Where You Stand?
Book a S/4HANA Change Readiness Check. We’ll review your migration stage, stakeholder map, comms resourcing, and adoption risks—and show where the Playbook can accelerate impact.
FAQ
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SAP’s end of mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7 (incl. ECC) is end of 2027; extended maintenance runs (at a premium) to end of 2030. After that you’re on costly custom support. Your end-state can be S/4HANA Cloud (Public or Private), On-Prem, or hybrid—SAP’s strategy encourages Cloud but does not force it for every landscape. The real risk is timeline compression if you wait.
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Roughly 35K organisations still run ECC. Gartner data shows ~39% have begun the move (licensed / in transition), leaving a large cohort yet to start; analysts warn many will miss the 2027 window if they delay. Late starts lead to rushed testing, data clean-up shortcuts, and—most expensive—insufficient time to prepare people.
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Traditional OCM in SAP programs often concentrates on training delivery, cutover readiness, and org role mapping. What typically gets underfunded: a compelling value story, stakeholder-specific narratives, sustained program visibility, and adoption analytics tied to real business KPIs. That gap becomes acute in multi-country S/4HANA rollouts where culture, language, and local priorities differ. The Change Playbook layers story, stakeholder activation, comms cadence, and adoption metrics on top of your existing OCM—no rework, just the missing piece that protects value. Industry research shows S/4 programs frequently overrun scope, schedule, and budget—strong stakeholder engagement helps contain those risks.
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System Integrators excel at technical build, configuration, data migration, and often end-user training. Where many SI-led programs struggle is translating technical milestones into business value messages that resonate outside the project room, tailoring comms by country/Business unit, and sustaining sponsor visibility over multi-year timelines. We work alongside SIs with a light-touch governance model: clear RACI, shared calendars, co-branded (or white-label) artifacts as you prefer. Clients and SIs tell us our involvement actually reduces noise—fewer last-minute comms scrambles, fewer duplicate decks, tighter handoffs into training. Given the high frequency of schedule/budget deviation in S/4 transformations, aligning the human side early is pragmatic risk insurance.
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Having an engaged Internal Comms lead is gold—and we build around that, not over it. The challenge: S/4HANA programs are deep-tech, multi-phase, jargon-heavy, and run for years; most IC teams are bandwidth-constrained and rarely staffed for sustained ERP transformation narrative + analytics. The Change Playbook gives your IC lead a ready-made structure, templates, message library, stakeholder maps, cadence planner, and adoption dashboard hooks so they stay in strategic control while we supply surge capacity and SAP-specific pattern recognition. Your stay true to your internal tone of voice, the execution load drops and adoption measurability goes up.
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Yes. The Change Playbook was designed so your project team + Internal Comms can run 80% in-house. You choose the level of support: lite coaching, guided sprints, or co-delivery. Most clients start with a facilitated Readiness Sprint, then take ownership with periodic check-ins. That keeps costs down and builds internal capability while still hitting adoption KPIs.
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Not at all. Many teams call us mid-project when they realise local stakeholders are confused, sponsors are fatigued, or user readiness metrics are thin. We can drop in, run a rapid comms gap scan, and integrate with your existing workstreams without derailing timelines—a useful lever given the high incidence of schedule slippage in S/4 programs.