SAP S/4HANA Project Failure and Delay Statistics (2026)

Most S/4HANA programs miss their plan. For a program director the useful questions are how far they miss, why, and how much of the slip lands in the test and cutover window that you are asked to sign off. This page collects the most recent sourced figures on S/4HANA delays, overruns, quality shortfalls and outright failures. It also shows the wider ERP benchmarks and the adoption backlog that will put more pressure on delivery before the end of 2027.

Key takeaways

How often S/4HANA programs miss schedule, budget and quality

The most detailed S/4HANA-specific outcome data comes from Horváth. In Q1 2025 the firm surveyed 200 executives at SAP user companies with at least €200 million in revenue and at least 200 employees, across DACH, selected Northern and Eastern European countries and the US. Read the figures with one caveat in mind: only 37 of the 200 companies had completed their migration. The "on schedule" figures are therefore based on a small group.

• Transformations take 30% longer than originally planned on average (Horváth, April 2025).
• Only 8% of companies that had completed the transition did so on schedule (Horváth via CIO, 2025).
• More than 60% of companies report deviations in budget, schedule and result quality (Horváth, 2025).
• Among completed transformations, the largest deviations were in result quality and budget, at 65% each (Horváth study summary, 2025).
• Of the 200 companies, 57% were still mid-transformation. Only 7% had not started at all.

Source: Horváth, 2025 and CIO, 2025. Base: companies that had completed their transformation.

A conflict inside the Horváth data. Horváth's press release says that fewer than one in ten completed companies stayed within schedule. The study summary says almost 60% of completers exceeded the planned schedule. One possible explanation is that the remaining completers finished "roughly on plan" in some category the 8% figure leaves out, but Horváth does not publish a breakdown that would settle it. When you quote the study, say which figure you are using.

Separate analyst data points the same way. ISG's State of SAP Migrations report (February 2026) surveyed more than 200 senior decision-makers at large companies and found that nearly 60% of SAP migration projects run late or over budget. We read this figure in a summary by testing vendor Qyrus and could not access the primary report.

Why the plans slip: root causes

Horváth names scope expansion during the transformation and weak project management as the main reasons for deviation. Asked what they would do differently, respondents said:

• 46% would estimate a longer project duration, more than 40% would increase the budget from the outset, and 30% would reduce the scope (Horváth via CIO, 2025).
• Secondary write-ups of the full report also list "underestimated test and data migration phases" among the named causes of plan deviation. That is the cause most directly relevant to test leads.

Biggest migration hurdles cited by Horváth respondents. Source: MyBusinessFuture summarizing Horváth, 2025 (secondary)

A 2023 vendor survey found the same pattern earlier in the cycle (historical; vendor data). Basis Technologies polled 200 enterprises using SAP in the UK, US and Germany. Respondents named inadequate preparation (75%), a lack of internal skills or resources (50%), and ignoring the issue because the deadline seemed far off (50%) as the top barriers.

Source: Basis Technologies (vendor), September 2023

ISG's research, as summarized by Qyrus, points to unclear decision rights and acceptance criteria between integrators and service providers as a primary driver of delay. For a sign-off owner, unclear acceptance criteria is the risk most directly within reach.

Benchmarks beyond SAP: ERP failure and overrun rates

Cross-vendor ERP data gives useful context, but it is not S/4HANA-specific and the populations are different.

• Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet their original business case goals, and as many as 25% will fail catastrophically.
• Gartner also reports that 75% of ERP strategies are not strongly aligned with overall business strategy.
• Panorama Consulting Group's 2026 ERP Report covered 170 organizations, with data collected January 2025 to January 2026, a median revenue of $200.5 million and a median project timeline of nine months. It found 30.0% of projects over budget and 22.3% completed late (as summarized by ERP vendor XoroSoft). These are mid-market, mostly cloud projects: 73.5% of deployments in the study were cloud, hosted, managed or SaaS.

Source: Panorama Consulting Group 2026 ERP Report, as summarized by XoroSoft (vendor), 2026

Data quality matters for both budget and schedule. Among Panorama respondents whose projects went over budget, these were the causes cited:

Source: Panorama Consulting Group 2026 ERP Report, via XoroSoft, 2026. Base: over-budget respondents.

Among projects that ran late, 36.8% cited data issues. Panorama's own press release describes a familiar pattern: organizations find fit gaps late, then respond with extra technology, scope expansion and custom builds.

Why the ERP-wide figures look gentler than the S/4HANA figures: Panorama's sample has a median nine-month timeline and is mostly cloud. Horváth surveyed larger SAP customers, many of them doing brownfield conversions. Do not use Panorama's 30% overrun rate as a planning benchmark for a large ECC estate.

The adoption backlog: how much of the ECC base has not moved

Gartner tracks how many ECC customers have licensed S/4HANA. By the end of Q4 2024, about 39% of a worldwide base of 35,000 ECC customers had bought or subscribed to S/4HANA licenses. That is up from 37% in Q2 2024 and 34% a year earlier.

Share of ECC customers that have licensed S/4HANA. Source: Gartner via The Register, March 2025

• At the current rate, Gartner projects 17,000 holdouts in 2027, nearly half of the ECC base, and 13,000 still on ECC in 2030 (Gartner via CIO, 2025).
• IDC's Mickey North Rizza expects 40% to 45% of ECC users to remain on the older ERP through 2027 (CIO, 2025).
• Vendor model (Basis Technologies, 2025): only 57% of ECC customers will have finished their transformation by the end of 2027, and about 80% by the end of 2030.
• In the Americas, research commissioned by Precisely found that two-fifths of SAP users had yet to leave legacy ERP (The Register, November 2025).

Licensed, live and completed are different measures, so the figures conflict. Gartner's 39% counts licenses bought or subscribed, not go-lives. Basis Technologies estimates that about 28% of the original 35,000 were live at the end of 2023. A Houlihan Lokey industry report put completed migrations at about 15% of ECC customers in October 2024. For delivery planning, the gap between "licensed" and "completed" is the work still waiting for integrators and test teams.

DACH reality check: the DSAG 2026 numbers

DSAG surveyed 198 member companies in December 2025 and January 2026. DSAG notes that SAP ran the 2025 survey, which reached more large companies. The 2026 figures are therefore more comparable with 2024 than with 2025.

Source: DSAG Investment Report 2026, via all-about-security.de, 2026. Respondents can run more than one system, so the shares overlap.

• Among ECC users, around half plan to switch by the end of 2030 and accept extended-maintenance surcharges. 37% aim to switch by the end of 2027, and 4% not until 2033.
• DSAG states directly that not all companies will complete the S/4HANA transformation by 2027 (DSAG, February 2026).
• The 2025 report, with its different sample, found 47% on ECC, and almost a quarter of ECC users still undecided about their target architecture (CIO, 2025).

Share of respondents planning high or medium 2026 investment, by system. Source: DSAG Investment Report 2026, 2026

Budget and business-case pressure

Budget trouble is increasingly the first problem users report. In ASUG's 2025 Pulse of the SAP Customer research, 52% of respondents cited budget issues as their most widespread challenge, up from 35% the previous year. ASUG links the jump to the acceleration of S/4HANA and cloud migrations.

Source: ASUG, March 2025

• Vendor data (Rimini Street, a third-party support provider, survey of 455 organizations): 95% say making an ROI case for S/4HANA is difficult or takes significant effort, and nine in 10 are concerned about rising subscription costs (CIO, 2025).
• In the same survey, nearly a quarter plan to stay on on-premises ECC. Treat this with care, given the vendor's commercial interest in ECC support.
• On costs, Gartner's Christian Hestermann has said that a typical project could run into tens of millions of dollars (The Register, 2024).

People, skills and partner dependency

• ASUG's 2024 research (766 members surveyed in October and November 2023) found that S/4HANA expertise is the top skill members lack.
• In the same research, 27% said they struggle to keep up with the pace of technology change, and 28% struggle to find internal candidates with the skills to manage new projects (CIO, 2024).
• The same 2024 cohort was optimistic. 47% were using S/4HANA or starting implementation, and 69% expected to have implemented it within two years. That two-year window has now closed. The DSAG and Gartner figures above show how far the market as a whole is from that pace.
• According to IDC, as cited by Houlihan Lokey, about 77% of SAP customers will rely on a partner for their S/4HANA migration (October 2024). Partner capacity and partner quality therefore drive outcomes.

When it goes wrong: the Zimmer Biomet case

Zimmer Biomet's lawsuit against Deloitte Consulting is the most detailed public record of a recent S/4HANA failure. The figures below are allegations in a complaint that Deloitte disputes. Deloitte filed a motion to dismiss on November 7, 2025.

• Zimmer Biomet seeks at least $172 million and alleges it paid $94 million in fees for a system "riddled with defects and functionality gaps" (Loeb & Loeb, September 2025).

• The program began under a $69M work order. The business case projected a 10-year net benefit of $197M to $316M, and the complaint calls the July 2024 go-live premature (UpperEdge, September 2025).
• A governance review counted 51 change requests introduced during delivery and describes go-live being prioritized over business readiness (SAP Community, 2025).

Source: UpperEdge, September 2025; Loeb & Loeb, September 2025

AI: can it shorten the timeline?

AI is being added on top of transformations that are still in progress. It does not replace that work.

• Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 because of cost, unclear value or inadequate risk controls (quoted by Huron, 2026).
• In DACH, 43% of DSAG respondents already have AI use cases in production (DSAG Investment Report 2026).

Key enablers of AI adoption in SAP landscapes. Source: ASUG and SAP, "Navigating AI in SAP Landscapes," 2026

Widely quoted numbers to treat with caution

These figures circulate widely, but we could not confirm them against a primary source, so we did not use them above.

• "92% of SAP migrations finish late" from "200 completed migrations." Some write-ups describe Horváth's sample as 200 completed migrations. In fact only 37 of the 200 respondents had completed.
• "189% average ERP budget overrun" and "68% ERP failure rate." Some blogs attribute these to Panorama. We could not trace them to Panorama's published 2026 findings, which show 30.0% of projects over budget.
• "49% of live S/4HANA customers over budget, up 17 points from 2023 (ASUG 2026)." A consultancy cites this figure, but ASUG's report is member-gated and we could not verify it.
• "30% of in-motion migrations delayed or over budget (Precisely/ASUG 2026)." This is quoted by consultancies, but we could not locate the primary publication.

What this means for your sign-off

• Plan the test calendar on an evidence-based slip. Horváth found programs running 30% over plan on average, and 46% of respondents said in hindsight they would have planned a longer duration. Testing sits at the end of the plan, so a slip upstream shortens it unless the test windows are protected by contract. Build phase gates and contingency into your ECC to S/4HANA testing plan before Realize starts.
• Treat data as a schedule risk, not a cleanup task. In Panorama's 2026 data, 36.8% of late projects and 29.4% of over-budget projects cited data issues. Run full-volume mock loads early, and use production-like data under a proper test data management approach.
• Write acceptance criteria into every partner contract. IDC expects about 77% of customers to rely on a partner. ISG links delays to unclear decision rights and acceptance criteria across providers. Define exit criteria for SIT, UAT and cutover rehearsals, and name the person who signs each one.
• Control scope, or re-baseline regression. Scope expansion is Horváth's top cause of deviation, and the Zimmer Biomet complaint describes 51 change requests. Tie every change request to traceability and regression impact, and make go-live readiness a documented decision: see the Go/No-Go Readiness Checklist and Mock Cutover Rehearsal Tracker in our template library.
• Size for the deadline crunch. Gartner projects about 17,000 ECC holdouts in 2027, and around half of DSAG's ECC users plan for 2030. Integrator and tester capacity will be tight. Decide early whether extended maintenance fits your timeline; our guide to ECC end-of-maintenance dates covers the options.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of S/4HANA projects finish on time?

In Horváth's 2025 survey, only 8% of companies that had completed their S/4HANA transition did so on schedule. The base is small: 37 of the 200 respondents had completed.

How much longer do S/4HANA migrations take than planned?

On average, 30% longer than originally planned, according to Horváth's survey of 200 executives in Q1 2025.

How many S/4HANA projects go over budget?

Horváth found budget deviations in 65% of completed transformations. ISG, as summarized by Qyrus, reports that nearly 60% of SAP migrations run late or over budget.

How many SAP ECC customers have moved to S/4HANA?

It depends on the measure. Gartner counted about 39% of 35,000 ECC customers as licensed at the end of 2024. Fewer are live: Basis Technologies estimated about 28% live at the end of 2023.

What is the most common cause of S/4HANA delays?

Horváth names scope expansion and weak project management. In secondary summaries of the same study, 49% of respondents cite business-process change as the biggest hurdle.

Will companies finish before ECC mainstream maintenance ends in 2027?

Many will not. Among DSAG's ECC users, only 37% aim to switch by the end of 2027. Gartner projects about 17,000 holdouts in 2027.

Sources

1. Study shows: SAP S/4HANA transformations rarely go as planned, Horváth, April 10, 2025
2. Business Transformation Unlocked: Maximizing the Benefits of SAP S/4HANA, Horváth, 2025
3. SAP customers struggle with S/4HANA migration, CIO, 2025
4. Why 60% of SAP S/4HANA Migrations Miss Their Deadline (summarizing ISG State of SAP Migrations, February 2026), Qyrus (vendor), 2026
5. SAP S/4HANA Migration: 60% Over Budget, MyBusinessFuture, 2026
6. Slow S/4HANA transformation among enterprises caused by "inadequate" preparation, Basis Technologies (vendor), September 2023
7. The True State of S/4HANA 2025, Basis Technologies (vendor), 2025
8. Enterprise Resource Planning to Optimize Operations, Gartner, accessed 2026
9. Panorama Consulting Group Releases Latest Study of ERP Implementation Outcomes (2026 ERP Report), Panorama Consulting Group, 2026
10. ERP Integration Failure Statistics 2026, XoroSoft (vendor), October 2026
11. ERP Implementation Statistics 2026, XoroSoft (vendor), October 2026
12. SAP legacy ERP customers still in no rush to adopt latest platform, The Register, March 20, 2025
13. RISE with SAP sinking year on year, says analyst, The Register, September 16, 2024
14. Nearly half of SAP ECC customers may stick with legacy ERP beyond 2027, CIO, 2025
15. Two-fifths of SAP Americas users yet to ditch legacy ERP, The Register, November 5, 2025
16. SAP Industry Overview and Insights, Houlihan Lokey, October 2024
17. DSAG-Investitionsreport 2026: Unternehmen investieren gezielter, DSAG, February 26, 2026
18. DSAG-Investitionsreport 2026: SAP bleibt gefragt, all-about-security.de, 2026
19. DSAG: Mehr Budget, mehr S/4HANA, IT-Matchmaker News, 2026
20. DSAG-Investitionsreport 2026: KI wird zur strategischen Bewährungsprobe für SAP, IT-Onlinemagazin, February 2026
21. Nearly 25% of SAP ECC customers unsure about their future (DSAG 2025), CIO, 2025
22. ASUG Pulse of the SAP Customer Research 2025, ASUG, March 9, 2025
23. ASUG Members Embrace the Future in 2024 Pulse of the SAP Customer Research Results, ASUG, 2024
24. SAP customers see S/4HANA and AI as top digital transformation drivers, CIO, 2024
25. Navigating AI in SAP Landscapes: Adoption, Execution, and Value, ASUG and SAP, 2026
26. SAP customers not sold on S/4HANA ROI (Rimini Street survey), CIO, 2025
27. ERP modernization: The complete guide (quoting Gartner), Huron, 2026
28. Loeb & Loeb Represents Zimmer Biomet in $172 Million Lawsuit Against Deloitte, Loeb & Loeb, September 2025
29. Zimmer Biomet's $172M ERP Lawsuit Against Deloitte, UpperEdge, September 11, 2025
30. What the Zimmer Biomet SAP S/4HANA project failure teaches us about governance, SAP Community, 2025
31. Deloitte accuses Zimmer Biomet of filing "through the looking glass" suit, MassDevice, 2025
32. Why 92% of SAP migrations finish late, Lunatec, 2026 (reviewed for accuracy; not used as evidence)
33. ERP Implementation Failure, Cudio, 2026 (reviewed; not used as evidence)
34. SAP S/4HANA Migration: The Hidden Technical Debt, Interexy, 2026 (reviewed; not used as evidence)
35. SAP S/4HANA Migration: Why 2026 is the Decision Year, The Silicon Partners, 2026 (reviewed; not used as evidence)

Last updated: October 18, 2026. Statistics are refreshed as new research is published.