ERP is Easy

What will happen to SAP ECC in the future?

Is it worth learning ECC in 2024 given that everyone is moving towards S/4HANA?

Is it a big switch moving from ECC to S/4HANA for the consultants?

These are the topics I am going to discuss in this blog.

If you are new here, my name is Aroon and I make videos and write blogs about SAP. I also offer 1-on-1 SAP career coaching to students and professionals. Please check out this link.

Now, getting into the topic.

Firstly, what is the future of SAP ECC?

Let’s take a look at an article that was published by SAP in which it says that

• SAP will provide mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 core applications until the end of 2027.
• And what are those Business Suite 7 core applications? They are SAP ERP 6.0 also known as SAP ECC 6.0, SAP Customer Relationship Management 7.0, SAP Supply Chain Management 7.0, SAP Supplier Relationship Management 7.0, SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA which is nothing but an SAP ECC system running on the HANA database.
• What happens from 2028? SAP offers their customers, two choices. One is to purchase extended maintenance until 2030 for an extra 2 percentage points of support maintenance fees. Usually SAP customers pay 22% of their total license value every year as a support maintenance fee. If the customers want to purchase extended maintenance, then they will start paying an extra 2 percent which means 24% from 2028 til 2030. Say for example, your organisation’s total SAP license value is 1 million dollars. Normally, you will pay 22% of that which is 220,000$ every year to SAP as a support fees. With extended maintenance you will pay 24% which is 240,000$.
• After 2030, if you still haven’t switched to S/4HANA, then your organisation’s SAP contract will go into customer specific maintenance.
• So, to summarise, SAP ECC will remain in mainstream maintenance until the end of 2027 then after that, if the customer wishes to purchase extended maintenance, they can do so until end of 2030. Then after 2030, if the customer remains to stay on SAP ECC, then it will go into customer specific maintenance.

• You need to understand the definition of three things here. What is the difference between mainstream maintenance, extended maintenance and customer-specific maintenance.
• When a customer encounters an error in an SAP system, they usually create a support ticket with SAP. The error that the customer is facing could be due to a bug in the software. There are two types of bugs, one is a known bug that was previously identified and SAP has provided a solution via an SAP note or a SAP patch. The other one is a new bug that was discovered by the customer just now so SAP will create a solution for it and give it to the customer.
• Mainstream maintenance means SAP will support both new bugs and existing bugs in the system. Extended maintenance is also same as mainstream maintenance but you pay an extra 2 percent to SAP and Customer specific maintenance means SAP will only support already known bugs.
• Say for example, it is now past 2030 and your organisation hasn’t upgraded to S/4HANA, you come across an error in ECC. You create a ticket with SAP support and if that error was caused by a known issue and a solution already exist, then SAP will support it. But if it’s a brand new bug for which a solution doesn’t exist, then SAP is not obliged to create a solution for that new bug.

Is it worth learning SAP ECC in 2024?

As we saw in the previous section, ECC is supported by SAP at least until 2030 which is 6 years away. 6 years is a long time and anything can happen during that time.

Still there are so many organisations that haven’t made the switch to S/4HANA and they may not do so until 2030 or even beyond that for various reasons such as

• They may not have the budget ready. S/4HANA implementations might take a few months to few years depending on the size and complexity of the organisation. It might cost a few million dollars and the organisations do not have budgets allocated for that.
• Or they have other priorities that they want to concentrate at the moment.
• Or they don’t have a need to move to S/4HANA. I am sure there are some advanced features available in S/4HANA but an organisation may not have a need to make use of those advanced features.

For these reasons, some organisations might stay with SAP ECC at least for the near future which means there will be demand for your ECC skills.

Is it a big switch moving from ECC to S/4HANA for consultants?

The short answer is no because underneath the bonnet, S/4HANA still has the same business process as ECC.

Of course there are some new functionalities available in S/4HANA like it runs on the HANA database, it has got Fiori and embedded analytics, you can do the month end closing faster since no reconciliation is required, there is no vendor and master but a single entity called business partner and so much more.

But the underlying core concepts are still the same.

The processes like accounts payable, accounts receivables, raising a purchase requisition, raising a purchase order, billing and invoice, depreciation configuration, etc are still the same.

So if you learn SAP ECC, you will cover all the core concepts of an SAP ERP system and in the future if you want to switch to S/4HANA, it will be pretty easy to do so.

To give you a simple example, learning ECC is like learning to drive in a tractor. S/4HANA is like a car. A car is of course better than a tractor but the core driving concepts like acceleration, braking, changing gears, turning left or right is all the same whether it is a tractor or a ferrari.

So if you get a chance to learn or work with SAP ECC then do it as it will help you to switch to S/4HANA when eventually the time comes.

I recently made a video about the key differences between ECC and S/4HANA, check it out.

Please share the blog with your friends as it may benefit them as well.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments and I will respond.