ECC to S/4HANA in six months, with six hours of downtime.
How a multi-plant packaging manufacturer converted a heavily customized SAP ECC landscape to S/4HANA by brownfield conversion, carrying 1,000+ custom objects forward and cutting its database footprint by 60%.
A specialist supplier of quality-assured, precision-folded cartons, inserts and outserts to leading pharmaceutical and FMCG brands, operating since the 1970s with in-house production and integrated quality control across multiple manufacturing plants.
SAP had been the core business application since 2007, heavily tailored to packaging-industry needs: more than 1,000 custom ABAP objects, many output forms, and integrations to SAP BusinessObjects, DMS, barcode systems and a non-SAP automation engine.
The business trigger
A mature ECC landscape ready for its next platform.
Years of successful customization had made the ECC system central to the business, and also made the move to S/4HANA a careful piece of work. The company wanted the speed and simplification of S/4HANA without losing what made its SAP fit the business.
Period-end close held back by batch dependencies
Month-end depended on long batch runs; the business wanted a close it could run at any time.
Reporting ready to be faster
Error correction and reporting visibility lagged the pace of the plants.
Customizations worth keeping
1,000+ custom objects and output forms carried real business logic and had to come across intact.
Finance ready for New GL
Classic GL was still in place, alongside GST changes and new S/4HANA notes to absorb.
The skie.io approach
A brownfield conversion planned from the impact up.
The team applied its conversion methodology, accelerated by its rapid-deployment cockpit, to assess technical, Basis and functional impact before anything moved. Scope: ECC conversion, landscape and business transformation, New GL migration, and 100+ standard Fiori apps across FI/CO, SD, MM, PP, QM, PM and DMS.
Impact assessment
Custom code remediated to HANA standards via Code Inspector; Business Partner impact on vendor and customer master mapped; BRF+ output and direct-posting dependencies identified.
Finance first
New GL facelift completed before conversion, with document splitting activated so compliance, including the GST changeover, was built in.
Sandbox
Built from the latest production data; code migrated, converted and tested through several iterations.
QA
Code freeze, downtime confirmation, migration, testing and bug fixing on the target landscape: S/4HANA application tier on Windows, HANA on Linux.
Production
Validated cutover and go-live, with peripheral systems reintegrated within 24 hours.
Results
Faster close, simpler finance, smaller footprint.
The conversion completed in six months with six hours of technical downtime and sixteen hours of functional downtime in production.
Business impact
- Month-end close sped up, with a soft close possible at any time
- Reconciliation effort between Finance and Controlling eliminated
- Return to standard: faster support and upgrades, less complexity to manage
Operational impact
- Six hours of production technical downtime; sixteen hours functional
- Peripheral systems integrated within 24 hours of go-live
- 100+ standard Fiori apps live across seven modules
Technology impact
- Database footprint reduced from 415 GB to 168 GB, about 60% smaller
- 1,000+ custom objects remediated and carried forward
- Document splitting and GST compliance built into the core
Why it matters for your estate
The path-B proof: customizations kept, change window contained.
This is the one-step conversion path in practice. For an ECC estate where the custom code is worth keeping, brownfield gets the business onto S/4HANA with one cutover and one test cycle, and the impact assessment up front is what keeps the downtime to hours.
Custom code travels
Remediation to HANA standards means the Z-objects that carry business logic come across, rather than being rebuilt.
Finance prepared ahead
New GL and document splitting handled before conversion took the riskiest change out of the cutover window.
Hardware cost down
A 60% smaller database footprint lowers run cost on whatever infrastructure follows.
What comes next
A standard core, ready for the cloud.
With the business on S/4HANA and back on standard, the landscape is positioned for the next move: SAP-certified infrastructure on AWS, operated from day one, with the custom periphery now cleanly separated from the core.
Facing a VMware renewal or the SAP ECC deadline?
Two clocks are running. Make one decision, not two.
See the four S/4HANA paths, the 30-day assessment, and how skie.io moves SAP and everything around it, lands it optimized, and operates it from day one.