Mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 on EHP 6 and above ends at the end of 2027, yet the DSAG Investment Report 2026, surveying members in December 2025 and January 2026, found a majority of respondents still had ECC or the older Business Suite somewhere in their landscape. ISG, drawing on 200 senior decision-makers at large companies, offered a reason through its principal analyst Michael Dornan in February 2026: “A lot of the delays are caused by people, not necessarily the technology.”

That should encourage consultants, since delays rooted in human judgment are the kind a well-informed advisor can help a client work through.

The Calendar Is Published, and the Options Narrow After 2030

DSAG’s own reading, in its February 2026 release, is that some customers need more time and will accept higher maintenance costs to get it, with complex landscapes, skills shortages, parallel projects and limited budgets pushing schedules back.

SAP puts a price on that extra time, with optional extended maintenance running to the end of 2030 at additional cost. After that, the SAP ERP Private Edition Transition Option offers what SAP describes as its “largest and most complex customers” a non-mandatory subscription covering 2031 to 2033, available to buy from 2028, provided the relevant systems have moved to SAP ERP, private edition, before the end of 2030.

Clients on third-party databases face a firmer edge: SAP CTO Philipp Herzig wrote on SAP News on 7 October 2026 that their Business Suite 7 systems can only convert to S/4HANA before the end of 2030, after which SAP describes greenfield as the only route.

The pattern extends to the Americas: ASUG research based on 194 members, reported by diginomica in October 2026, found around a third of organizations moving to S/4HANA had experienced delays. So why do so many decisions stay open?

Some Delays Are Sound Strategy

Some of that delay is reasoned. Roughly four in five DSAG respondents named the cost-effectiveness of SAP software and economic conditions as challenges shaping their SAP investment, and Gartner, quoted by ITdaily in February 2025, observed that many customers “are unable to make a compelling business case for moving to S/4HANA.”

SAP’s own decisions may also have encouraged some clients to wait. At Sapphire in May 2026, Christian Klein said most Joule assistants and agents would reach ECC and on-premise S/4HANA, as an interim solution, for customers “that have already committed the majority of the landscape to the journey,” a change The Register called a U-turn on his 2023 stance.

AI cuts both ways. DSAG found that most members already using AI were running those use cases on non-SAP solutions, which may reduce the urgency for some, while analysts quoted by CIO in September 2026 argue that heavily customized landscapes limit what AI can deliver.

Status Quo Bias Makes a Working System Hard to Leave

Behavioral research may help explain the delays that remain, although the studies examined other kinds of decisions and suggest a pattern for ERP without proving one.

Samuelson and Zeckhauser found in 1988 that people choose an option more often once it is framed as the existing state of affairs, and Johnson and colleagues saw most drivers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania keep whichever car-insurance default their state set.

Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory adds that losses tend to weigh more heavily than equivalent gains, which may make the familiar costs of ECC feel smaller than the uncertain risks of a new system. Omission bias research by Spranca, Minsk and Baron in 1991 found people tended to judge harm from action more harshly than harm from inaction. Former Gartner analyst Derek Prior made a similar point about ECC teams to Computer Weekly in 2019: “The people running it are not paid to take risks.”

In ISG’s survey, as reported by The Register, more than half of respondents agreed they had customized legacy ERP to the point where standardization “now feels risky.”

Sunk Cost Turns Old Custom Code Into an Argument

Arkes and Blumer described in 1985 how people keep investing in a course of action because of what they have already spent, and Barry Staw’s 1976 study, later supported by a 2012 meta-analysis from Sleesman and colleagues, found that escalation tends to increase when the person deciding was responsible for the original choice.

In SAP landscapes, that original choice often means years of custom code and process design. IDC data from 2025, reported by CIO, showed around half of organizations still preferring a customized ERP approach, and ISG found roughly half doing little or no re-engineering on the way to S/4HANA. PAC analyst Joachim Hackmann, writing in E3 Magazine in April 2026, describes much of the custom code in highly individualized ECC landscapes as no longer used, which suggests some of what clients protect has stopped earning its keep.

Lidl’s eLWIS program is often cited in discussions of long-running ERP commitments. Started in 2011 and halted in 2018, it ended with the chief executive writing, in Consultancy.uk’s translation, that the goals as originally defined “were not possible at an acceptable expense,” and Lidl describing the outcome as a decision for its own system. Protecting investment can still be right: Sunlight Group, profiled by CIO in September 2026, kept custom development only where it set the business apart, such as its variant configurator.

Fear of Disruption Rests on Real Evidence

In our view, fear has the firmest factual footing of the three. ISG’s 2026 research found a majority of SAP migrations over budget and behind schedule, with only 15% finishing on time and on budget.

Haribo’s 2018 S/4HANA go-live is still cited as a cautionary case: it was widely reported alongside supply problems to retailers, Haribo pointed to other commercial factors as well, and commentators questioned the timing near Christmas and the depth of testing. Among ASUG members who experienced delays, changes in the business were the most common cause, ahead of unexpected complexity and scope creep.

DSAG’s October 2026 congress called for freedom of choice in operating models, reliable roadmaps and no organizational overload. These barriers often arrive mixed with legitimate constraint, so a consultant’s first task is working out which one is in the room.

Diagnose Before You Persuade

A practical method is sorting barriers to an S/4HANA decision into three groups before trying to answer them. An acquisition, a restructuring or a regulatory deadline such as an e-invoicing mandate is an external constraint that belongs on the plan. Budget, internal capacity and skills are resource constraints that can be sized and planned for. The behavioral patterns described above can arrive dressed as one of these, which makes them easy to miss.

Practitioner experience suggests a handful of warning signs, offered here as judgment: the stated reason for waiting changes each time the decision comes back, nobody has costed what doing nothing would mean, the decision rests with the people who designed the current system, and every answer points to the next release.

Stakeholders can also hold different barriers: in many organizations, finance leaders focus on value and opportunity cost, IT leadership on delivery risk and accountability, and key users on what the change means for their standing and daily work. Where a works council holds co-determination rights over systems capable of monitoring employee performance, involving it early can have a real effect on the timeline.

Make Standing Still a Visible Decision

One way to test status quo bias is to turn the default into an explicit choice. Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord proposed a reversal test in 2006: if a change in one direction is judged harmful and the opposite change looks harmful too, the burden falls on explaining why the current setting is best. A practical adaptation for clients is to ask whether they would choose today’s ECC landscape if they were starting from S/4HANA.

Renato Assis of Ábaco Consulting, writing in Intelligent CIO in February 2026, recommends comparing migration cost with the cost of current inefficiencies, such as prolonged close cycles, excess inventory and integration failures. AI readiness can enter that costing too.

Evidence drawn from the client’s own systems is harder to dismiss than general argument. SAP Readiness Check reports on simplification items, custom code and add-on compatibility for a specific system, and SAP Signavio’s process mining tools measure how processes perform. Key users whose standing rests on ECC knowledge may resist less once they are invited to co-author the target design.

Separate Past Spend From Future Value

Sunk cost arguments become easier to address when the conversation moves from what was spent to what carries forward. Custom code analysis, combining ABAP Test Cockpit checks with usage data, separates code still in use from code nobody runs, and presenting it as a sorting exercise helps keep judgment of past decisions out of the room.

Selective data transition can let clients keep chosen history and configuration while redesigning the areas with the most technical debt. With finance stakeholders, opportunity cost and forward-looking value tend to be the more persuasive terms, since standard decision analysis leaves past spend out of the comparison between future options. The escalation research suggests a practical step: bringing a fresh review group in alongside the people who made the original decisions may reduce the pull of personal responsibility.

Reassurance That Survives Scrutiny

Reassurance is easier to trust when it arrives as a plan. Mock cutovers, phased rollouts, a go-live timed away from peak trading and data quality work before design each answer a specific fear, and are worth raising before the client asks.

Gary Klein’s premortem, described in Harvard Business Review in 2007, asks a project team to imagine the program has already failed and explain why, a technique designed to surface concerns while they are still cheap to address. Change management deserves its own costed workstream, because people-related risk is often harder to quantify than technical risk. Where a client’s internal capacity is thin, a later, better-prepared start can be the more defensible advice.

Check Your Own Bias

Consultants carry biases too. Anthony Patt and Richard Zeckhauser, writing in 2000, described action bias, a preference for doing something even when waiting would serve better. ISG noted in March 2026 that the growing expectation on providers to challenge client assumptions can leave their incentives pointing somewhere different from the client’s, and ASUG’s Blake Baltazar, discussing AI adoption, described the pressure organizations feel to be seen moving: “no one wants to seem like they’re being left behind.”

Clients are likely to notice when advice tracks the advisor’s interest, and in our view a consultant who has recommended waiting when the evidence supported it earns a better hearing on the day they recommend a move.

The Career Case for Becoming the Consultant Who Moves Decisions

Holger Scheel, managing director of the SAP consultancy cbs, told CIO in April 2026 that work closest to pure implementation, such as classic development, testing and configuration, is under greater pressure while consulting as a whole is expanding, and in his view 2030 is the more realistic target for larger companies with many ERP systems. Commentary in Computerwoche in July 2026 argued that the SAP skills shortage persists, though the downturn is masking it.

Our view at IgniteSAP is that if decisions cluster toward 2030, demand is likely to rise for consultants who can diagnose a stalled decision, build a business case, interpret process evidence, plan custom code remediation and lead change conversations. Employers find it easier to reward work they can see, so record your advisory and pre-sales contributions along with what they led to, and bring them to your reviews, your CV and your interviews.

If you are an SAP consultant looking for a new role where advisory skills like these are recognized and rewarded, our team of dedicated recruitment consultants can match you with your ideal employer and support you at every step, so join your exclusive community at IgniteSAP.