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The deadline nobody can move

Your ECC runs out
of road in 2027.

SAP ends mainstream maintenance for ECC on 31 December 2027. A typical S/4HANA programme takes 18 to 36 months. Work backwards and the comfortable window has already closed for large landscapes — and is closing now for everyone else.

Take the readiness checkTalk to a consultant

Until mainstream maintenance ends

—Days
—Hrs
—Min
—Sec

Counting to 31 December 2027. After that, extended maintenance is available at additional cost until the end of 2030, with eligibility conditions attached.

The actual sequence

Work backwards from the duration, not forward from today

The mistake is planning from the deadline. The useful exercise is adding up how long each stage really takes and seeing where that lands you.

  1. Now

    Readiness assessment

    SAP Readiness Check against production, custom code inventory and interface mapping. Days of effort, and every later estimate depends on it.

  2. +3 months

    Decision and business case

    Deployment option chosen, transition approach selected, costed plan approved. Procurement and partner selection sit inside this window.

  3. +6 to 30 months

    Programme delivery

    Explore, realise, test, migrate, cut over. Six to nine months for a focused conversion; eighteen to thirty-six for a complex multi-entity programme.

  4. 31 Dec 2027

    Mainstream ECC maintenance ends

    Standard support for SAP Business Suite 7, including ECC 6.0, ends. SAP has signalled no further functional updates beyond this point.

  5. End of 2030

    Extended maintenance ends

    Available at additional cost with conditions attached. A paid extension on a system receiving no functional improvement — not a reprieve.

Four-minute self-check

Eight questions that tell you where you actually stand

Answered honestly, these are the things a partner will ask in the first meeting. Nothing is sent anywhere — the scoring runs entirely in your browser.

  1. 01Have you run SAP Readiness Check against your production system in the last 12 months?

  2. 02Do you have a current inventory of custom code, including which objects actually execute?

  3. 03Is every inbound and outbound interface documented with a named owner?

  4. 04Have you decided between on-premise, private cloud (RISE) and public cloud (GROW)?

  5. 05Have you chosen a transition approach — greenfield, brownfield or selective?

  6. 06Is there an approved budget and an executive sponsor for the programme?

  7. 07Do you have a partner engaged, or a procurement process already running?

  8. 08Is your master data in a state you would be comfortable migrating as-is?

0 of 8 answered

Straight answers

Four things we hear, and what's actually true

"We have until 2030."

Extended maintenance is a paid add-on with eligibility conditions, covering a system that receives no further functional improvement. Planning to it means paying a premium to stand still while competitors invest the same money in capability.

"Our system will stop working."

It will not. ECC runs on 1 January 2028 exactly as it did the day before. What changes is your support position, your access to fixes including security fixes, and your compliance exposure.

"RISE includes the migration."

RISE covers licence, infrastructure and technical managed services. Fit-to-standard, custom code remediation, data migration, integration, testing and change management — the bulk of the real effort — are not included.

"We will start next year."

Add procurement and partner selection to the programme duration. For anything beyond a simple single-instance conversion, starting in 2027 does not leave a workable window — and you would be competing for consultants with everyone else who waited.

Start cheap

The first step costs very little and tells you a lot

A readiness assessment runs in days, not months, and produces the evidence every later estimate depends on. There is no good argument for delaying it.

Book a readiness assessmentSee our S/4HANA services