Cross-Industry
SAP S/4HANA migration with AI–Enabled Clean Field
Business challenge and opportunity
More than 60%1 of SAP customers have yet to complete migration to S/4HANA. As ECC end-of-life deadlines approach, this creates a strategic inflection point for businesses. Over time, ECC environments have evolved into complex landscapes shaped by extensive custom code, undocumented modifications, tightly coupled integrations, fragmented data and regional process variations.
This complexity limits agility and visibility. Lack of clear insight into customizations and dependencies slows decision-making and increases operational costs. Modernization becomes harder to scale as technical debt grows, making transformation initiatives riskier and more resource intensive.
Cultural and organizational challenges add further pressure. Misalignment between IT and business stakeholders, resistance to change, and fatigue from prolonged transformation programs can delay progress and undermine adoption.
At the same time, SAP transformation introduces heightened operational, security, compliance and user-experience risks. Poorly executed transitions can disrupt mission-critical processes, inflate costs and erode stakeholder confidence.
Organizations need more than a system upgrade. They need a precision approach that reduces complexity, aligns stakeholders, minimizes disruption and enables a confident move to SAP S/4HANA with a clean, future-ready core built for continuous innovation and long-term value.
Technical challenge
The core technical challenge in ECC-to-S/4HANA transformations is not migration execution — it is choosing a path that does not embed long-term limitations.
Brownfield perpetuates technical debt
Migrating “as-is” often shifts accumulated customizations and inefficiencies into S/4HANA, increasing long-term complexity and limiting clean-core innovation.
Greenfield increases disruption and rework
Rebuilding from scratch demands extensive process redesign, prolonged timelines, and business disruption — often requiring teams to recreate valuable custom logic.
Hybrid compounds complexity
Combining selective rebuilds with legacy transfers can introduce integration risk and architectural inconsistency without fully resolving root causes.
Lack of visibility slows decision-making
Undocumented custom code, tightly coupled integrations, and inconsistent data structures make it difficult to determine what should be retained, redesigned or retired.
Data volume and quality constrain innovation
Full data lifts inflate costs and complexity, while poor governance reduces readiness for analytics, automation and AI-driven SAP capabilities.
With the right approach, Agentic AI can address these structural modernization barriers directly — providing a third path that avoids recreating the past or starting from zero.
Our solution
Kyndryl’s AI-enabled Clean Field approach provides a precision path from ECC to SAP S/4HANA. Instead of lifting legacy constraints into the new environment or rebuilding everything from scratch, Clean Field systematically determines what to keep, what to redesign, and what to retire — before migration begins.
Guided by enterprise architecture and powered by Agentic AI, selective data transformation, and structured change management, Clean Field delivers a faster, lower-risk, and more cost-effective transition to S/4HANA and SAP Cloud ERP.
Clean Field eliminates the trade-off between continuity and innovation by preventing legacy lift while avoiding unnecessary rebuild — enabling a clean-core-aligned S/4HANA foundation.
Through Kyndryl’s collaboration with Nova Intelligence, multi-agent AI systems automate custom code discovery, fit-to-standard and gap analysis, remediation, and test generation — reducing manual effort and accelerating timelines with human-in-the-loop oversight.
Kyndryl’s Data Transformation Suite enables high-fidelity migration that improves data quality, preserves lineage, and reduces data volumes — strengthening analytics, compliance, and AI readiness.
An enterprise architecture-driven model connects applications, data, integrations and infrastructure decisions — ensuring modernization supports future SAP innovation, scalability and resilience.
Human-centered change management prepares stakeholders, aligns IT and business teams, and protects operational continuity throughout transformation.
For a global professional services organization, Kyndryl enabled AI agents to analyze more than 56,000 custom SAP programs, creating a clear, cost-effective roadmap to S/4HANA and SAP RISE, while delivering:
In another engagement, Kyndryl modernized large volumes of custom Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) programs for a global food processing organization using Agentic AI — preserving critical, fit‑for‑purpose customizations while eliminating technical debt, achieving...
...migrating only relevant data to S/4HANA, and reducing total cost of ownership to enable a faster, more cost‑effective SAP S/4HANA transition.
Benefits you could achieve
Kyndryl’s Clean Field approach enables organizations to modernize from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA with measurable improvements in speed, cost and long‑term readiness:
- Up to 3× faster modernization cycles2, driven by AI‑automated code analysis, remediation and decision support — greatly reducing manual tasks.
- Substantial reduction in technical debt, enabling a true clean core that simplifies maintenance and speeds future enhancements in the S/4HANA environment.
- Radical simplicity in the data footprint by cutting SAP data volumes up to 80%2 through precision, selective data transformation—improving performance, quality and governance while strengthening analytics and AI readiness.
- Lower effort and lower cost by reducing custom code modernization effort up to 75%3 and cutting costs up to 50%3, minimizing disruption and rework across future upgrades.
- Greater innovation readiness, with a modern, modular S/4HANA foundation that accelerates adoption of emerging AI‑driven capabilities.
- Gain stronger adoption with structured change management that helps protect operations and accelerate adoption, reducing resistance and enabling teams to realize value faster with less disruption.
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Why Kyndryl
Kyndryl supports enterprises across the full SAP lifecycle, from strategy and consulting through implementation, modernization, organizational change management and managed services. We work with you to co-create transformation paths aligned to your business priorities, helping you move to SAP Cloud ERP with confidence, speed and control.
With more than 30 years of experience orchestrating mission-critical SAP environments, Kyndryl has overseen hundreds of complex SAP migrations globally. We bring the scale, discipline and operational rigor required to reduce risk, protect business continuity, and maximize long-term value from SAP investments.
Our teams combine deep SAP expertise with advanced engineering, AI-driven automation, and proven delivery frameworks, helping organizations modernize faster, operate more efficiently, and realize stronger ROI from their SAP transformations.
The Kyndryl difference
- Pragmatic SAP modernization approach — Transformation strategies grounded in real-world operational realities — not one-size-fits-all programs.
- Proven experience with complex SAP landscapes Decades of delivery across highly customized, mission-critical SAP environments.
- Innovation at scale 3,200+ patents across AI, multi-cloud orchestration, security, and enterprise platforms.
- Enterprise operational depth
15,000+ SAP and enterprise application platforms managed worldwide and Kyndryl Bridge to seamlessly integrate SAP and non-SAP applications. - We align AI strategy with business outcomes through Kyndryl Consult. Kyndryl Vital provides proven user-centered design and rapid prototyping. And our trusted delivery experts ensure frictionless integration and help with reskilling and upskilling to build the foundation for success at scale.
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1 SAP legacy ERP customers still in no rush to adopt latest platform, The Register, March 2025
2 This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by Kyndryl at any time without notice. Not all offerings are available in every country in which Kyndryl operates. The performance data and client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. Kyndryl products and services are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.
3 Nova AI case study