Stop Trying to Prove the Value of the Future

It’s not about trying to find an ROI to upgrade to S/4HANA. It’s about finally unlocking the one you already have.

Somewhere in a sunlit boardroom, a team of executives stares at a slide deck—thirty-five pages deep into a familiar presentation. The message hasn’t changed much since the last ERP justification round ten years ago: "Move to the cloud. Enhance customer experience. Improve operational efficiency. Increase adoption. Enable revenue growth."

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Not because those goals aren’t real. But because no one in the room really believes the system alone will deliver them.

And here’s the truth that’s beginning to echo louder across industries: SAP—regardless of version—already has the horsepower. What’s missing isn’t functionality. It’s fluency. Most enterprises aren’t getting what they need from SAP not because it lacks features, but because their people haven’t been educated to use it as it was designed to be used.

Let that settle in.

Because if you ran your plants or equipment as underutilized as you run SAP, you'd be fired. And yet, companies spend millions on digital transformation and still end up back where they started—high inventory, low service levels, spreadsheets everywhere, and teams drowning in exceptions and firefighting.

So why would moving to S/4HANA magically fix that?

The uncomfortable reality is this: upgrading your SAP system won’t erase bad habits, fix broken processes, or suddenly inspire better decisions. Yes, S/4HANA is slicker, faster, more powerful. Technically superior. But the business outcomes people are hoping for? They don’t come from new features. They come from mastery.

And mastery doesn’t come from training manuals.

It comes from education—real education that empowers business users not just to follow steps but to understand why those steps matter. To see the system not as a hurdle, but as a tool. To stop treating SAP like a reporting platform and start using it as the operational engine it was always meant to be.

Take Loparex.

They had a bold vision: unify their operations under a single global S/4HANA instance. A logical step. But when the system went live across four manufacturing sites, frustration bubbled to the surface. Users reverted to legacy workarounds. Planning broke down. Alerts piled up. And confidence eroded fast, especially with customers.

It wasn’t the software that failed. It was the education gap.

Through a focused, human-centered effort, Loparex stepped back—not from the technology, but from the assumption that implementation equalled adoption. Teams were reintroduced to SAP, not as a monolithic system, but as a responsive toolset. They learned how to interpret and act on alerts, how to shape master data to reflect business logic, how to use planning functions to get ahead of demand instead of reacting to it.

The shift was electric. Inventory dropped 39%, freeing up working capital without compromising service. OTIF jumped 24%, powered by new confidence in ATP (Available-to-Promise). Exception messages plummeted. And perhaps most importantly, people stopped struggling. The weight of confusion lifted. SAP became a partner in performance—not a barrier to it.

And with that success in hand, the case for S/4HANA became obvious. Not because the system would save them. But because they had already proven that SAP, when used properly, works. The upgrade simply became a means to extend that value.

It’s the same story at Greene Tweed Co., a company with a bold seven-year revenue doubling plan and a supply chain still reeling from COVID-era shocks. Legacy customizations choked their SAP ECC environment, leaving planners tangled in manual workarounds, unable to trust the system or promise reliable delivery dates.

No amount of cloud migration could have solved that—not without first changing the relationship between people and the system they depended on.

So instead of launching into a massive upgrade, they paused. They educated. They redefined what good looked like—not just in output, but in how people engaged with the platform.

ATP was turned on and for the first time the team could make a promise and keep it, and customers believe them—after decades of being disabled by custom code and work arounds. Planners and buyers were shown how to manage the very master data elements that drive material flow. Schedulers discovered how to visualize and manage capacity in real time. Buyers moved to consumption-based planning, cutting manual effort. Warehouses optimized layout and process using SAP WM. And with it all came time—precious hours previously wasted on struggle now redirected to strategic work.

The result? Inventory dropped by 20% from peak saving millions of dollars. Manual planning hours fell by 50–60 per week across the production planning team. Dead stock, exceptions, and overdues plummeted. And here’s the kicker: the organization now stands ready for S/4HANA—not as a leap of faith, but as a logical next step in a journey of value that has already begun.

This is what most enterprises are missing when they sit down to build a business case for S/4HANA.

You’re Going About It the Wrong Way.

SAP already has the functionality to enable planning accuracy, reduce inventory, improve service levels, and drive down human struggle. You don’t need new tech to do that. You need educated and knowledgeable users—business professionals who understand how the system works, why it works that way, and what they can do with it.

That’s not training. That’s transformation.

The kind that rewires behavior, not just process. That clarifies decisions, not just clicks. That makes SAP an asset to the business—a driver of performance rather than a cost center of frustration.

And once that foundation is laid, the move to S/4HANA becomes something else entirely.

Not a leap. A lift.

Because when your business users know how to use SAP, when they trust it, when they see it as a tool that works for them—not against them—you don’t have to convince them to upgrade. They’re already asking for it. Not for the fancy dashboards, or the Fiori apps, or the speed. But because they’ve seen what’s possible.

The real ROI of S/4HANA doesn’t start with a budget projection. It starts with education. With proving that SAP can work. That it can perform. That it already contains the potential to move the needle on the metrics that matter.

Prove that, and the business case writes itself.

So, before you spend millions chasing an upgrade, ask a simpler question:

What would happen if our people knew how to use what we already have?

Because the truth is, the ROI you’re looking for isn't in the cloud.

It’s in the room.