Apart from these innate advantages with S/4HANA, the ERP migration process could be your opportunity to standardize overall business processes, and introduce changes in the system to improve efficiency and compliance. Even before you embark on the ERP migration process, here are the top challenges that you would have to consider:

1. Expensive and Time-Consuming process:
• ERP migration is a mammoth task and could go on for a very long time, sometimes extending to several years as IT teams have to collaborate with all business teams right from core operations/supply-chain to finance functions including A/P, A/R and, accounting.
• Involving business teams in these projects for long durations of time would not only be expensive for companies strictly in terms of man-hours spent but also impact their productivity for day-to-day operations.
2. Data Quality:
• Given the complexity of running large organizations, ERPs on their own are not enough and companies rely on disparate systems, spreadsheets and other tools to perform operations.
• Lack of standards for storing data is often the biggest challenge and incomplete or missing data and multiple versions of the same data increase the complexity of the migration project manifold.
• Underestimating the scope and costs of data migration process especially to the universal ledger in S/4HANA could be the biggest pitfall that project owners should avoid
3. Change Management:
• Study after study states that operational disruption is a routine challenge during ERP go-live. In case of finance functions this is a big problem as teams are no longer able to close books during period ends.
• Project leaders routinely point to organizational change and people issues as the reasons for these disruptions.
• Given the scale of ERP migration projects, project managers are better off understanding nuances of how teams and even individuals use the current system and prepare a structured training plan that focuses on how to standardize these operations in the new version.
• It is also very important to keep communicating to everyone who is impacted by the migration project. Communication channels are also very important as not everyone has her own preference for consuming such content whether it be the company?s internal social network or the bulletin boards or in-person meetings.
4. Business Process Re-Engineering and Custom Functionality:

• Moving to a new ERP or a new version of ERP allows room for business process re-engineering while taking into consideration some of the new technology innovations
• At the same time, native ERP functionality is not enough for specialized functions such as order-to-cash. So teams relied on customizations for many years.
• Custom codes fundamentally pose two challenges:

1. only a small subset of the functionality is used by the teams in fact a study commissioned by SAP found that only 23% of the custom functionality was supporting critical business processes
2. People who requested for that custom functionality or people who built that may no longer be in the organization leading to a lot of effort in understanding why that code exists and whether it is critical for running operations

• ERP migration is also the right time to eliminate non-critical customizations and tweak existing processes to run on out-of-the-box functionality to simplify future migration projects