Why so many S/4HANA go-lives go wrong and what to do before yours does
There's a moment every project team dreads. Go-live day arrives, the system switches on, and within hours it's clear something is badly wrong. Orders aren't processing. Financial reports are producing incorrect figures. The warehouse module that worked perfectly in testing is throwing errors in production.
This isn't a hypothetical.
Real-World Case · November 2025
In the first week of November 2025, Tennant Company a Minnesota based global manufacturer with approximately $1.2 billion in annual revenue cut over to a new company-wide SAP cloud ERP system in North America. Within days, the business could no longer reliably process or ship customer orders.
Tennant is not an outlier. It is a pattern.
The numbers behind the problem
S/4HANA migrations are among the most complex programmes an enterprise can undertake. A 2025 study by management consultancy Horváth, covering 200 companies across Europe and the US, found that problems are not the exception, they are the rule.
>60% of companies experience significant deviations in budget, schedule, and result quality during S/4HANA migration. When you break that headline number down, each dimension tells its own story:
When you look at what drives those outcomes, inadequate end-to-end testing appears consistently near the top of every post-mortem.
Why manual testing isn't enough
An S/4HANA implementation touches everything: procurement, inventory, finance, production, HR, reporting. Every area has interconnected workflows. A change made to fix one process can silently break another and in a complex SAP landscape, the number of scenarios that need validating before go-live is enormous.
Manual testing cannot keep pace with that complexity. Business teams are already stretched running day-to-day operations while contributing to the implementation. Test cycles run long. Coverage is incomplete. By the time testers work through the backlog, the system has changed again.
Go/no-go decisions get made on gut feel rather than evidence. Stakeholders ask "are we ready?" and the honest answer is "we think so." That is not a foundation for a safe go-live.
The pressure isn't easing
According to research by Precisely and ASUG published in November 2025, 59% of companies are now fully or partially live on S/4HANA up 13 percentage points from 2024, as organisations race to meet SAP's 2027 mainstream support deadline. That deadline is concentrating significant demand into a short window. Implementation partners are busy, experienced SAP resources are stretched, and organisations still mid-migration are under pressure to accelerate which is precisely when testing shortcuts get taken.
The irony is that cutting corners on QA doesn't save time. It borrows it, at a punishing interest rate. Every defect caught in testing costs a fraction of what it costs to fix in production.
What structured QA actually changes
The alternative to hoping for the best is building confidence through evidence. Structured, automated quality assurance means running comprehensive regression tests continuously throughout the migration using Tricentis Tosca, not just at the end. It means knowing, with data, which business processes are passing and which aren't. It means walking into a go/no-go decision with a dashboard, not a feeling.
For an S/4HANA programme, that typically involves:
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Risk-based test coverage
Prioritising the processes that carry the most business risk, so testing effort goes where it matters most.
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Automated regression
Running the same tests repeatedly with Tricentis Tosca across every system change, without adding weeks of manual effort.
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End-to-end process validation
Testing complete workflows across SAP modules, not just individual transactions in isolation.
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Release readiness reporting
Giving leadership a clear, objective view of where the programme stands before go-live — replacing gut feel with data.
“S/4HANA migrations will always be demanding. But there is a meaningful difference between a programme that arrives at go-live with evidence-based confidence and one that arrives with crossed fingers.”
Ready to go live with confidence?
Talk to us about building a QA strategy using Tricentis for your S/4HANA migration before it becomes a problem.
Contact COGO Consulting