A new survey from Precisely and the American SAP Users Group (ASUG) shows SAP users are accelerating their S/4HANA migrations. Unfortunately, the pressure to migrate platforms and a surge of new tools are stalling the use of automation. The latter is being caused by a rush of new entrants into the space. IT teams are having to rethink what works best for them and what they want to achieve.
The survey Transforming SAP Processes Through Automation – 2026 Trends & Challenges (registration required) is short at 21 pages but packs a punch. It shows a jump of 13% of organisations that have now moved to SAP S/4HANA. With SAP closing its ECC platform in 2027, migration is a necessity. However, this jump still leaves just 59% of SAP customers having moved to SAP S/4HANA. For those yet to migrate, 2026 will be a stressful year.
But moving requires modernising many ERP environments, and that is one of the stumbling blocks that this survey uncovers. Business process change (49%) and customisations (44%) are major barriers that they are struggling with. The survey also highlights that there is a significant cultural issue across many organisations. This is evident in the persistence of “organisational resistance” as a core obstacle (37%).
Ashwin Ramachandran, Senior Vice President, Product Management at Precisely, said, “SAP users are making real progress on modernisation, but they’re also facing some of the most complex transformation challenges in the ERP landscape.
“Organisations successfully managing this complexity are the ones striking the right balance – keeping on-going migrations on track while advancing automation strategies that deliver long-term value.”
Automation should be the solution, but it is stalled
Last week, Precisely announced new updates to its Automate Evolve platform to drive SAP migration. But this survey shows that automation has stalled. Its use at 57% is down 1% from 2024. Just as importantly, those considering automation is down to 22% from 25% last year. But with the pressure to migrate, a drop in automation seems counterintuitive.
At the heart of the problem is the budget. 30% say that their SAP migration projects are either delayed or over budget. It is driving a refocus of resources to migration and away from other initiatives, such as automation. Additionally, while Precisely has dominated the automation market with Automate Evolve, the survey shows a raft of new competitors. Some of them are software vendors, but AI agents and LLMs are also creating uncertainty.
This has created a problem with evaluation mode, creating inaction, although that is becoming less of an issue. Over the last three years, the number of companies stuck has reduced from 28% to 23% and this year, 13%. It’s a recognition that automation is essential and that teams need to make a decision and go with it.
The survey also shows that when companies do move forward, automation is deployed on a case-by-case basis. That finding is consistent over the last two years, showing that unblocking projects results in automation.
What else is stalling automation?
Last year, the most commonly identified reason was integration. This year, it is process complexity (62%). In many ways, that is ironic as automation, especially with a human-in-the-loop approach, enables complex processes to be broken down into simpler steps. With ERP, processes often involve input from multiple teams, which delays their speed. Automation has the ability to improve collaboration and remove complexity.
Integration has slipped to second place, tied with defining process requirements (49%). Each department has its own business rules. Defining processes means understanding the impact of those rules at every step. However, as processes are automated, replication of the steps in each process makes it possible to automate more processes. But that requires a library of process automation steps, something the survey does not look into.
No-code / low-code comes of age
One of the big takeaways from this survey is the role of no-code / low-code and the growth of citizen developers. This is an area where organisations differ in their approach. Some organisations see no-code / low-code as speeding up their internal development and as part of the software engineer’s tools. Others, such as highlighted in this survey, see it as a tool to allow employees or “citizen developers” to develop software.
The survey shows that last year, more than 50% of respondents now see citizen development as part of their automation strategy. 38% say it is important, while 13% say it is very important. But the survey also tells another story here. Last year, those numbers were 47% and 11% respectively. That drop will disappoint many and, perhaps, reflects the complexity of creating the components used by those citizen developers.
Data quality is a hidden challenge
Data quality continues to be a key factor in success or failure for any transformation from AI to migration. For organisations migrating from legacy ECC systems, data accuracy and integrity are major issues. Data restructuring is a significant challenge as it is moved from one system to another. It requires data cleansing, enhancement and verification.
Poor data quality also impacts productivity, as this article from the SAP Community website shows. With organisations increasingly worried about low productivity and the drag on revenue, improving data quality is necessary. What is not clear from this survey is exactly how many projects are stalled due to poor data quality. It’s a missed opportunity to understand its impact, especially given the Precisely data quality solutions.
An explosion of user interfaces
Over half the organisations surveyed operate in a fragmented user interface (UI) environment. That is down from 58% last year. On the positive side, 18% (9% in 2024) say they have moved entirely to web-based UIs and primarily SAP Fiori apps. While this move is positive, the fragmented state in which many operate creates problems with workflows and user experience (UX).
Solving those workflow and UX challenges is time-consuming. Scripting, testing and training for each UI also impact process development. Each interface variant requires separate scripting, testing, and training, making it harder to achieve process consistency.
According to the survey, “Many IT teams hesitate to adopt automation solutions until their UI strategy stabilizes, to avoid duplicating development work across multiple environments.”
Unfortunately, the survey doesn’t ask specifically about the number of projects that are stalled directly due to UI and UX issues. What is clear is that for many organisations, UI and UX, more than any other factor, is a root cause of their problems. Solve the issues here, and you unlock greater automation. Unlock automation, and you unlock data quality and migration.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
With a little over a year left until SAP turns off ECC, organisations still have significant amounts of migration to do. They face many blocking factors, some soft issues like cultural resistance to change and some hard issues like technology. How they solve these will be a measure of their operational and organisational maturity.
What we learn from this survey is that there are solutions, but much more needs to be done to implement them. The easy answer would be to throw money at the problem, after all, these are core systems. Reality says that that isn’t going to happen because there isn’t enough budget to do that.
Further complicating this are new technologies. The rise of AI is causing people to think about different ways to automate, which is one such example. For automation players like Precisely, embedding automation into their tools is part of the solution. But is that enough to help customers out of their indecision?
Unfortunately, like too many surveys and reports, this is another quantitative piece of work at a time when organisations need qualitative reports. They want to know the how of getting this done, not a list of issues they know they face. It doesn’t matter to them that their competitors are also stalled. They want a roadmap they can implement.
With so little time left, maybe the ASUG should take a different approach to this problem and focus on solutions, not just issues.
