1. Your S/4HANA Migration Timeline Assumes You Know Where Your Data Lives

Migration leads naturally plan around technical execution risk. They focus on cutover windows, custom code remediation, and functional gaps. A 2025 Horváth study of 200 SAP customers, however, found the real damage happens elsewhere.

Researchers discovered that 60% of S/4HANA transformations significantly exceed their budget or schedule. Only 8% of completed migrations went live on time, running 30% longer than planned on average.

The Reality of Scope Expansion

Horváth’s respondents did not blame the core technology. Instead, they pointed directly to scope expansion mid-project, underestimated data migration phases, and repeated revision loops on process design.

A separate Precisely/ASUG survey of SAP customers echoed this sentiment from the ground. They cited business process change and heavy customizations among the top migration barriers.

Undiagnosed Dependency Failures

Translate that research into what actually happens on a project. A Z-table feeding three custom reports completely fails to surface in the functional blueprint. A CDS view remains populated by an ABAP routine nobody remembers is load-bearing.

These scenarios represent the exact “revision loops” the research names. Teams simply do not label them as dependency-mapping failures, because they have no way to see them before disaster strikes.

With ECC mainstream maintenance ending in 2027, you have no runway left to discover this mid-project. Going in without a complete map of which tables, custom fields, and ABAP objects feed which reports is a massive scope expansion you have already signed up for.

2. Routine Changes Keep Breaking Reports Nobody Thought Were Connected

A transport moves a field extension into production. Testing passes without a hitch. Two weeks later, a vital finance report goes blank. Even worse, it silently returns the wrong numbers entirely.

The team scrambles to trace it backward—table by table, join by join. This happens because the change management process only checked whether the new code was structurally correct. It failed to identify what else in the landscape was quietly reading from the same object.

The Limits of Regression Testing

This scenario highlights a severe visibility problem, not a testing discipline problem. More rigorous regression testing merely treats the symptom rather than the cause.

Most SAP change processes have no reliable way to answer what downstream reports, interfaces, or BW extractors touch a table before a transport goes out. Until you answer that question automatically, every routine change carries an undiagnosed risk.

3. Your Last Audit Turned Into a Manual Reconstruction Project

Ask most SAP teams if they have data lineage, and they will confidently say yes. This confidence shatters the moment an auditor asks them to trace a number from a financial report back to its source transaction.

Lineage that looked solid on a dashboard turns out to be documented entirely in someone’s memory. It lives on a stale wiki page or a set of Excel notes from the last audit cycle.

The Recurring Reconstruction Tax

For SOX, GDPR, or internal controls audits, begging for two weeks to reconstruct data flows does not equal being audit-ready. Reconstructing lineage manually every cycle is not a one-time cost. It functions as a recurring tax that grows every time the landscape changes underneath it.

This gap exists due to the absence of continuous, systemic traceability that does not depend on institutional memory to rebuild.

4. Your Lineage Tools Cover Systems, Not the Data Flow Between Them

Many organizations have already invested heavily in lineage tooling. They often buy a tool for BW, a different one bundled with the analytics platform, and rely on native lineage inside S/4HANA.

Each tool does its job within its own isolated boundary. None of them can follow a data element as it moves from ECC into S/4HANA, gets transformed in Datasphere, and lands in a Power BI report three hops later.

The Boundary Problem

That specific gap is where severe dependency problems actually live. Breaking changes rarely happen inside a single system; they happen at the handoff between systems. This is exactly where system-specific lineage tools stop looking.

Buying more per-system tooling fails to close this gap. It simply adds another silo for your team to reconcile. You need unified lineage that completely ignores system boundaries.

5. Nobody Can Tell You What Your Custom ABAP Code Actually Touches

Custom code is not a side detail in most SAP landscapes; it serves as core infrastructure. ASUG survey data puts custom code in use at 91% of SAP organizations. Roughly 90% of that code is written in ABAP and rated extremely critical to running the business.

Separately, Onapsis Research Labs found that a typical SAP system carries close to four million lines of custom ABAP. Shockingly, 70% of custom ABAP programs contain at least one critical issue.

The Custom Code Black Box

Almost none of that custom code connects to your lineage documentation. A report field traces cleanly back to a standard table until a custom routine transforms it mid-flight, causing the trail to go dark.

That routine applies hidden business logic invisible to any lineage tool that only reads table-to-table relationships. Closing that gap means treating ABAP logic as part of the data flow. You must parse custom code and connect it directly to the lineage it produces.

Addressing the Root Cause

The pattern across all five signs reveals a profound architectural failure. Each sign looks like a different problem—migration delays, broken reports, audit scrambles, tool sprawl, opaque code. However, they all trace back to the exact same missing layer.

Organizations lack complete, continuous visibility into how data actually moves and depends across the SAP landscape. Point fixes only address the immediate symptom in front of you.

Mapping the deep dependencies underneath addresses all five issues simultaneously, providing the structural confidence required to govern the modern enterprise.

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