It is not a secret that the deadline for SAP ECC support ends by 2025 and for the moment there is no sign that date will move. You would believe it gives businesses running SAP sufficient time to get prepared. Reality shows that many are not making much progress or just planning a technical upgrade to S/4 HANA.

The majority of SAP clients, especially those who already migrated R3 to ECC, have a lot of custom solutions on top of the standard functionality. Unfortunately most of those custom developments will lack proper documentation and those involved with the original design have left the company. This makes them vulnerable when they need to upgrade to S/4 HANA. Then they seek guidance from their service providers how to make the move to the new platform. Than a specific vision is required to make the transformation and take advantage of all the new capabilities on offer.

However, most SAP clients will get the advice from their service providers to make existing ECC code S/4 HANA compliant and move this to the new platform. In other words, no opportunity to verify if custom built developments have standard SAP solutions. Also no preparations for new technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain or Internet of Things. What if your competition is in limbo while you can make that leap to new techniques to improve your business processes and serve suppliers and clients?

When you believe that your migration to S/4 HANA could go hand in hand with a competitive advantage, then Business Rule Framework (BRF+) should be embraced as the tool for that transition today.

Business Rule Framework allows you to look at your custom code, find the areas where complex decisions are made and then transform them into configuration. The power of Business Rule Framework is the excellent prototyping and simulation capabilities. When the decision making has the expected results then the Business Rule Framework tool generates all the object oriented ABAP code by the press of a button.

But the real eyeopener is the ability to move the BRF+ objects from ECC to S/4 HANA. When you are a bit clever and keep the new S/4 HANA platform in mind while building solutions in ECC, then you can ensure that the converted code into configuration will work both on ECC and S/4 HANA.

So when your company runs SAP and your service provider is not proposing BRF+ as a means to handle a secure transition from ECC to S/4 HANA, then you should get a second opinion.

Find the service provider with proven BRF+ experience and let them build a few prototypes to prove the potential. It can be a game changing experience and makes you believe that moving to S/4 HANA is feasible and at the same time make steps ahead from your competition.