TL;DR: The Executive Summary
- 70% of SAP S/4HANA migrations fail to deliver expected value: not because of technology, but because of people.
- The three biggest killers: leadership misalignment, the talent gap, and poor user adoption.
- This playbook gives you a battle-tested, four-phase framework to de-risk your migration.
- Lampkin Brown clients have achieved significant cost reduction, measurable efficiency gains, and accelerated delivery timelines using these exact strategies.
- Your technology is only as powerful as the organization's ability to absorb it.
The Real Risk Isn't Technical: It's Human
Let's be direct: your S/4HANA migration is not a technology project. It's an organizational transformation that happens to involve technology.
The difference matters. Because while SAP can guarantee system uptime, no vendor can guarantee that your Finance team will stop using shadow spreadsheets. No implementation partner can force your Operations leaders to champion a process they don't understand. And no go-live date will magically close the talent gap that's been widening since you kicked off discovery.
This is the reality executive leaders must now confront. The organizations that treat S/4HANA as an IT initiative will struggle. The organizations that treat it as a change leadership imperative will win.
This playbook is your blueprint for the latter.
The Four-Phase Framework for De-Risking Migration
At Lampkin Brown, we've guided Fortune 2000 organizations through complex SAP transformations: delivering significant cost reduction, measurable efficiency gains, and accelerated delivery timelines against original plans. The difference-maker? A disciplined, four-phase change leadership approach that addresses culture, resistance, and adoption before they become crises.
Phase 1: Assess Readiness
Objective: Identify barriers and enablers before they compound into risk.
Most organizations skip this phase: or treat it as a checkbox exercise. That's a mistake. Early readiness assessment is where you surface the cultural landmines that will detonate six months from now.
Key activities:
- Culture assessment: Evaluate organizational appetite for change, historical transformation success rates, and leadership alignment.
- Impact analysis: Map how S/4HANA will alter day-to-day work across Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, Operations, HR, and IT.
- Stakeholder mapping: Create a matrix ranking influence, interest, and impact for each function to ensure targeted engagement strategies.
- Baseline measurement: Capture current awareness, desire to participate, and confidence in leadership: these become your adoption benchmarks.
Leadership implication: If your leadership team can't articulate why this migration matters beyond "SAP is ending ECC support," you have a readiness problem. Address it now.
Phase 2: Design & Develop
Objective: Build the change strategy, communication plans, and training roadmaps that will carry your organization through go-live and beyond.
This is where strategy meets execution. You're not just planning communications: you're architecting the psychological infrastructure that will support adoption.
Key activities:
- Change strategy development: Align change objectives to business outcomes, not just technical milestones.
- Communication architecture: Design a multi-channel approach: leadership messages, town halls, department briefings, intranet updates: that delivers consistent messaging and reduces uncertainty.
- Training roadmap: Develop mixed-modality learning (instructor-led, eLearning, guided workshops) using day-in-the-life scenarios that build confidence, not just competence.
- Change champion network activation: Identify and equip department champions with engagement toolkits, recurring touchpoints, and recognition plans.
Leadership implication: Your role here is co-creation, not delegation. Change strategies designed without executive fingerprints fail. Period.
Phase 3: Implement & Manage Adoption
Objective: Execute your change plan while actively managing resistance with data-driven insights.
This is where most migrations break down. The technology goes live, but the organization doesn't. Users revert to workarounds. Resistance goes underground. And leadership declares victory while value leaks out the back door.
Key activities:
- Activate the five leadership roles (see below): this is non-negotiable.
- Deploy structured communication cadence: Maintain drumbeat messaging that connects daily work to strategic outcomes.
- Deliver hands-on training and coaching: Supplement formal training with one-on-one leadership coaching to build visible proficiency at the executive level.
- Monitor adoption in real-time: Track system usage, process compliance, and sentiment against your Phase 1 baselines.
- Address resistance proactively: Use data to identify pockets of friction and deploy targeted interventions before they spread.
Leadership implication: You cannot outsource adoption. If your leaders aren't visibly using the new system, neither will anyone else.
Phase 4: Sustain & Reinforce
Objective: Embed changes into operations and transition to business-as-usual.
The migration isn't over at go-live. It's over when the new way of working becomes the way of working: when S/4HANA isn't "the new system" but simply "how we operate."
Key activities:
- Measure adoption against pre-implementation baselines and capture lessons learned.
- Celebrate milestones: Recognition reinforces behavior. Make wins visible.
- Transition ownership: Hand off change management to operational leaders and HR.
- Embed into performance management: Tie new behaviors to goals, reviews, and incentives.
Leadership implication: If you declare victory at go-live, you'll be back in 18 months wondering why nobody uses the system you spent $50M implementing.
The Five Critical Leadership Roles
Technology adoption is a leadership behavior, not an end-user training problem. To de-risk adoption, every leader in your organization: from C-suite to front-line managers: must perform these five roles alongside their day-to-day responsibilities:
| Role | Function |
|---|---|
| Communicator | Cascade messages explaining why the change matters: not just what is changing. |
| Advocate | Demonstrate personal support and visible alignment with the S/4HANA direction. |
| Enabler | Provide coaching, remove barriers, and create space for teams to learn. |
| Model | Demonstrate proficiency and confidence using new processes: publicly. |
| Reinforcer | Recognize adoption milestones and reinforce positive behaviors consistently. |
Here's the hard truth: If your executives aren't performing all five roles, you're asking your organization to do something its leaders won't do themselves. That's not a change management problem. That's a credibility problem.
Closing the Talent Gap: The Hidden Risk
S/4HANA migrations expose a gap that many organizations have been ignoring: the talent gap.
Your current workforce was trained on legacy processes. Your new system requires new skills: data literacy, process thinking, cross-functional collaboration. And the people who built your SAP knowledge base over the past two decades? Many are approaching retirement.
Three actions to address the talent gap:
- Upskill aggressively. Invest in capability-building that goes beyond system training to include process fluency and data interpretation.
- Recruit strategically. Identify critical roles where institutional knowledge meets technical proficiency: and start succession planning now.
- Leverage external expertise. Partner with firms that have navigated this transition at scale and can accelerate your learning curve.
Leadership implication: The talent gap won't close itself. And it won't wait for your go-live date. This is a parallel workstream, not a post-implementation afterthought.
Why This Matters Now
SAP's 2027 deadline for ECC support isn't a suggestion: it's a forcing function. And the organizations that treat migration as a compliance exercise will struggle to capture the strategic value S/4HANA can deliver: real-time insights, streamlined processes, and the operational agility to compete in increasingly volatile markets.
But that value doesn't unlock itself. It requires disciplined change leadership, relentless focus on adoption, and leaders who understand that their job isn't to implement a system: it's to transform an organization.
The question isn't whether you can afford to invest in change leadership. The question is whether you can afford not to.
Ready to De-Risk Your S/4HANA Migration?
Lampkin Brown has helped Fortune 2000 organizations navigate complex SAP transformations: delivering significant cost reduction, measurable efficiency gains, and accelerated delivery timelines through disciplined change leadership.
If your migration is on the horizon: or already underway and struggling: we should talk.
Connect with us to explore how we can help you turn your S/4HANA investment into lasting organizational value.