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YOUR SAP INVESTMENT UNLEASHED: WHAT DOES THE END OF MAINSTREAM MAINTENANCE MEAN
FOR SAP ERP CUSTOMERS, AND WHAT ARE YOUR OPTIONS?

Author Kristen Scheffler and VerNeil Mesecher
Published December 7, 2023
Reading Time 6 minute read
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Welcome back to the second edition of Your SAP Investment Unleashed, a new
column from Kristen Scheffler, Vice President of Customer Evolution for North
America, SAP, and VerNeil Mesecher, Sr. Director Customer Engagement Events
Liaison for North America, SAP. Together, they’re part of SAP Customer
Evolution, an organization focused on supporting, guiding, educating, listening
to, and enabling customers to get the most out of their SAP investments.

With mainstream maintenance for the latest three enhancement packages of SAP ERP
6.0—including SAP ERP Central Component (ECC)—ending Dec. 31, 2027, followed by
an optional extended maintenance phase until Dec. 31, 2030, many SAP customers
are actively assessing their options to stay in maintenance and move their
organization’s ERP investments forward.

In the first edition of this column, we discussed the differences between “end
of mainstream maintenance” and “end of life/support,” detailing the four
maintenance phases—mainstream maintenance, customer-specific maintenance,
extended maintenance, and priority-one support—defined under SAP’s maintenance
strategy.

In this edition, we’ll go a step further by exploring what move options are
available for SAP ERP customers facing the end of mainstream maintenance, and
what resources are available, free with customers’ existing investments in SAP,
to help them plan for the future.

Over the past decades, SAP has been continuously evolving and advancing in the
ERP market. We are truly grateful that you, our valued customers, have been on
this transformative journey with us, and we want to demonstrate SAP’s commitment
to leaving no customer behind and supporting you, regardless of where you are in
your journey.



 1. Move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. You could take the first step in your cloud
    transformation journey and select RISE with SAP to move to SAP S/4HANA
    Cloud, private edition or public edition. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public
    edition, you will receive a ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers
    pre-configured best practices to realize results immediately, continuous
    feature delivery, a new user experience, and market-leading localization.
    With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, you will receive a tailored-to-fit
    cloud ERP that adapts to your organization’s unique transformation journey.
    You receive innovations via bi-annual feature packages, customization and
    localization capabilities for complex scenarios, and access to the Clean
    Core dashboard.
 2. Move to SAP S/4HANA On-Prem. You could initiate a migration to an
    on-premises edition of SAP S/4HANA, with various transition paths available.
    With SAP S/4HANA on-prem, you will receive an intuitive user experience with
    SAP Fiori, a database architecture natively built on HANA that leverages the
    benefits of an in-memory and column-based database, and re-imagined business
    processes such as role-based access to business transactions and
    intelligence through machine learning applications.
 3. Upgrade and move later. If you currently have no enhancement package or EHP
    1-5, you could extend your mainstream maintenance to 2027 by upgrading to
    EHP 6-8. EHP upgrade efforts can be relatively high. Mainstream maintenance
    for EHP 6, 7, and 8 runs until December 31, 2027, followed by the option to
    purchase extended maintenance, which runs until December 31, 2030.
 4. Do nothing. You could decide to stay on your current SAP ERP system, moving
    into customer-specific maintenance. However, this path will lead to a
    reduced support scope, no legal or tax changes, and restricted security
    patches. Compliance of your systems might eventually be at risk.

Already included in your maintenance investment with SAP are tools, resources,
and reports, available at no additional cost, which you can leverage to assist
you in determining the right innovation path for you. 

The SAP Customer Evolution team is an additional resource available for
customers to discuss the pros and cons of each option and identify relevant
support tools, resources, and reports to assist in the decision-making process.
Below, we discuss some of the resources available to assist you in your
migration.

Just getting started in the discovery part of the process but not sure where to
begin with comparing your options?

Let’s say you are interested in a move to SAP S/4HANA, but are unsure if you
want to transition to cloud or remain on-prem. The SAP Enterprise Support Value
Map for SAP S/4HANA can help you understand what each option would mean for your
business, whether you are considering a greenfield implementation or evaluating
which deployment option would be best for you. Through the Value Maps, you
receive structured self-paced learnings to advance your digital skills, access
to collaborative forums and SAP experts for personalized guidance, and
Continuous Quality Checks to mitigate implementation risks or identify
optimization potential.

For more information on all of the available SAP Enterprise Support Value Maps
and to register for access, click here.

Perhaps you’ve made the decision to move to SAP S/4HANA, but you need to
understand your current customizations, as well as define what data you plan to
take with you.

Start with the Application Lifecycle Management Value Map. From a custom code
perspective, you will understand the need to adapt your custom code for SAP
S/4HANA and understand the Simplification Database: how to access it, and its
importance in adapting your custom code for SAP S/4HANA. You also need to
understand how to utilize the ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC) in adapting your custom
code for SAP S/4HANA. With regards to data volume, this value map can serve as
your introduction to data volume management and data archiving, providing
information on how to reduce your database size prior to an SAP S/4HANA
conversion, as well as how to use the Data Volume Management (DVM) application
to determine your DVM potential and predict future needs.

Maybe you have decided to remain on SAP ERP but are noticing extremely high
resource consumption.

Whether you’re noticing extremely high resource consumption during specific
processes/times, or performance problems with typically well-performing
transactions whenever a specific process is running, the Business Process
Performance Optimization Continuous Quality Check (CQC) can help. You can get
more information about this service here and all other CQCs offered by SAP here.
These are free services for customers on SAP Enterprise Support.

Regardless of your path, the SAP Customer Evolution team is here to support you
in your future transformation, helping you define and realize the next steps of
your business and IT evolution to ensure that you are well-prepared for upcoming
business opportunities.

For customers undecided on how to begin their path to SAP S/4HANA, we also offer
the SAP Customer Evolution Kit, a cost-free, quick, and efficient service to
elevate digital transformation with SAP S/4HANA through 1:1 sessions with
dedicated SAP experts.

As always, we invite any feedback, ideas, and topics that you would like to see
addressed, so don’t hesitate to connect with us. The goal of this column is to
help you leverage your existing investment in SAP to the fullest. You’ve paid
for it. Let’s get you using it!

Stay tuned for our next installment. Wishing you all a peaceful, very happy
holiday season!

Your SAP Investment Unleashed is intended to answer your burning questions and
address hot topics for the SAP community. Please contact the authors with your
questions, and future editions of this column will address them. Kristen
Scheffler can be reached at kristen.scheffler@sap.com, and VerNeil Mesecher, Jr.
can be reached at verneil.mesecher@sap.com.





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