The data is clear: the majority of S/4HANA programmes miss their targets on time, budget, and quality. The cause is not complexity. It is a governance gap that leaves senior leaders without an independent view of programme health.
With SAP's 2027 end-of-mainstream-support deadline approaching, S/4HANA migration is no longer optional for most enterprises. It has moved from strategic choice to operational imperative. Budgets are approved. System integrators are engaged. Programmes are underway.
But beneath the momentum, a pattern has emerged and the evidence should concern every CIO, CFO, and board member with an S/4HANA programme in flight.
What the data tells us
A 2025 Horváth study surveyed 200 SAP user companies across the DACH region, Northern Europe, and the United States, all with annual revenues exceeding €200 million. The findings are stark:
- 55% of completed migrations exceeded their planned budget. In a quarter of those cases, the overrun was severe.
- 65% missed their initial quality targets. Not minor deviations. Quality gaps significant enough to generate system instability, rework, and delayed value realisation.
- Projects took 30% longer than originally planned, on average. Only 8% were delivered on schedule.
The leading cause was not technical failure. It was scope expansion during transformation, compounded by poorly managed data transition, blueprints that were revised rather than fixed, and insufficient governance. In other words: decision failures, not engineering failures.
Five cases that illustrate the pattern
These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are public-domain examples of what happens when programme governance fails at scale.
Revlon: $64 million in lost sales and four investor lawsuits
In February 2018, Revlon rolled out S/4HANA across its North American operations. Within weeks, its largest manufacturing facility experienced service level disruptions severe enough to prevent it from fulfilling shipments to major US retail customers.
The direct cost was $64 million in unrecoverable lost sales. Remediation costs were reported at $54 million, though the actual figure is likely higher. The company's stock dropped 6.9% within 24 hours of disclosing the issue, and four law firms filed class action suits against Revlon, NOT against SAP or the integrator, but against the company itself for failing to disclose the risks.
Revlon's CFO resigned shortly after. The company cited a lack of design and identified material weakness in internal controls over financial reporting as a direct consequence of the implementation.
The Revlon case is significant not just for the scale of the loss, but for the accountability it established. The board was exposed because it could not demonstrate independent oversight of programme health. The information it received from the delivery organisation did not reflect operational reality.
Haribo: 25% sales decline during peak trading
In October 2018, Haribo began converting 16 candy factories across 10 countries to S/4HANA. The migration was intended to consolidate aging, heterogeneous ERP systems — some dating to the 1980s — into a single platform.
Shortly after go-live, the system could not track raw materials or inventory. Product shortages appeared in grocery stores across Europe during the holiday season — Haribo's peak trading period. Sales of the company's flagship Gold Bear product declined by 25%.
Post-incident analysis identified three failures: the system was not tested under full-scale operational conditions before go-live; SAP's standard configuration did not align with Haribo's logistics model; and executive alignment was insufficient to drive the change management required for a programme of this scope.
Lidl: €500 million written off after seven years
Lidl invested €500 million and seven years attempting to implement SAP, before reverting to its legacy inventory management system. The fundamental issue was a process-system mismatch that was never resolved: Lidl manages inventory by purchase price; SAP's standard model uses retail price. Despite extensive customisation efforts, the gap could not be closed.
Compounding the technical problem, Lidl delegated the implementation almost entirely to its system integrator and experienced an executive reorganisation mid-programme — fracturing ownership of the very decisions that would determine success or failure.
LeasePlan: €100 million write-off
LeasePlan, the Dutch fleet management company, terminated its S/4HANA implementation in 2019 and wrote off €100 million. The company had attempted to consolidate 35 different industry-specific systems into a single S/4HANA instance, across multiple global locations, using a big-bang rather than phased approach — while simultaneously reorganising its business model.
The failure was rooted in strategic misalignment: the digital transformation was running on a different track from the corporate strategy, and neither was adjusted to account for the other.
National Grid: $585 million remediation over two years
Though predating S/4HANA, National Grid's SAP failure remains the reference case for implementation litigation at scale. The company accused its integrator, Wipro, of deploying poor-quality consultants who produced flawed process mappings and severe design defects. The result was major audit failures and missed financial reporting deadlines.
The cleanup took more than two years and cost an estimated $585 million — exceeding 150% of the original implementation cost.
The structural problem: information asymmetry
Across all five cases — and across the broader Horváth dataset — the failure pattern is remarkably consistent. It is not that the technology does not work. It is that the people accountable for outcomes do not have an accurate picture of programme health until it is too late to act.
This is a structural problem, not a competence problem. It has three components:
- Delivery teams report progress, not risk. The commercial model of system integration incentivises reporting that sustains the engagement. This is not dishonesty — it is the natural consequence of asking the same party to deliver a programme and to objectively assess its health.
- Internal PMOs lack the independence to challenge. PMO teams embedded within the programme are accountable to the programme director, not to the board. Their perspective is shaped by proximity to the work, not distance from it.
- Boards receive filtered information. Status reports pass through multiple layers before reaching the CIO, CFO, or board. By the time a green dashboard turns amber, the cost of recovery has often already escalated by an order of magnitude.
The result is that senior leaders face a binary moment: the programme is either "on track" or it has failed. There is no early warning system. There is no independent signal.
What changes the outcome
The cases above share a common feature: at the point where independent assurance could have changed the trajectory, none was in place. The question for any senior leader with an S/4HANA programme in flight — or about to begin — is whether that gap exists in their organisation.
Three principles separate programmes that recover early from those that produce write-offs:
- Independent programme assurance, separate from the delivery organisation. Not a second opinion from the same ecosystem: a structurally independent view of whether the programme is on track, from a party with no commercial interest in the answer.
- Evidence over narrative. Programme health assessed against objective indicators — data migration readiness, integration test coverage, cutover rehearsal outcomes, operational simulation results — rather than subjective RAG status and milestone reporting.
- Early intervention, not post-mortem. The value of assurance is not in explaining what went wrong. It is in providing the signal early enough that the CIO, CFO, or board can act — before scope has expanded, before the budget is committed, and before the operational disruption has reached customers.
The statistical baseline is clear: the majority of S/4HANA programmes will miss their targets on at least one of time, budget, or quality. The question is not whether your programme carries risk. It is whether you have a line of sight into that risk that is independent of the people creating it.
Performance Radar provides independent delivery assurance for technology leaders running complex programmes. To discuss your situation, schedule a 15-minute introduction.