German optics giant ditches greenfield SAP migration

Zeiss Group has ditched plans for a greenfield ERP migration to latest S/4HANA platform from SAP following years of struggle trying to move off an ageing R/3 system.

The industrial optics company with revenue of around €11.896 billion said it was seeking to “realign” its ERP migration plans by moving its existing landscape to the new platform, a so-called "brownfield” migration.

SAP has long recommended that customers move to S/4HANA — a completely re-engineered version of its popular ERP system — with a clean-core approach, abandoning old customizations and adopting new processes at the same time.

It can prove a challenging, costly, and time-consuming journey for many customers as they grapple with business process and technology change in one project.

Reports suggest that Zeiss has sunk €200 million into the project to move from R/3 — the earliest version of which was introduced in 1992 — which began around 2020.

A company spokesperson told The Register that the company “continuously evaluates larger projects and adapts them flexibly as conditions change.” They said: “This also applies to the ERP migration, which has now been realigned to achieve faster progress in the transformation and to better meet the diverse requirements of the ZEISS segments.

“As a first step, the existing ERP landscape will be migrated to SAP S/4HANA.

The segments will then build upon this with individually configured solutions.

The result will be a group-wide core system with segment-specific applications that best reflect the similarities and differences in the processes,” they said.

The company declined to comment on the spending figure attributed to the project.

SAP has declined to comment.

Two years ago, CIO Carsten Trapp told the media the company had opted for a greenfield approach in its SAP migration.

He said it was a “a lifetime opportunity to clean up” because the company had “messed up our R/3 system over the last 30 years.” Moving to S/4HANA would mean the technology team could set up “all processes cleanly in the SAP standard from the start,” he told CIO magazine.

He said that in 2020, the board had recognized the scale of the challenge in moving off R/3 — which was replaced by ECC as SAP's main ERP product in the early noughties.