Your SAP Centre of Excellence (CoE) should be the engine of business value, driving innovation and enabling your organization to extract maximum return from your SAP investment. But for many organizations, the CoE has become something quite different: a bottleneck, a black hole for requests, or worse, an expensive team that merely keeps the lights on.
If you're planning a move to S/4HANA, understanding whether your CoE is truly functioning is critical. The transition to S/4HANA isn't just a technical upgrade; it demands a fundamental transformation in how your CoE operates, the skills it maintains, and the value it delivers.
The clearest indicator of CoE failure is when the business can't effectively use the system you're supporting.
Watch for these symptoms:
These aren't just inconveniences. They're tangible evidence that your CoE is failing to deliver system value to the organization.
A functional CoE accelerates business capability. A failing CoE does the opposite.
Common blocking behaviours include:
When the CoE becomes a blocker, dangerous patterns emerge. Business units might employ contractors directly to "get stuff done", bypassing established governance. They design workarounds that create data inconsistencies and compliance risks. They stop engaging with SAP altogether, reducing your return on a significant enterprise investment.
The ultimate sign of failure: When business stakeholders actively avoid involving the CoE because it's easier to work around the system than work with the team.
Perhaps the most insidious failure pattern is the CoE that's lost sight of its strategic purpose.
These teams are characterized by:
This pattern is particularly common in long-running ECC environments. Teams that have spent years maintaining stable systems often internalize a "don't break what's working" mentality. Innovation stops. Value delivery stops. The CoE becomes an expensive maintenance team rather than a strategic asset.
If your current CoE exhibits any of these warning signs, the transition to S/4HANA will be especially challenging. That's because S/4HANA fundamentally changes what a successful CoE looks like.
The shift isn't merely technical. It's cultural, operational, and strategic.
In the ECC world, customers could decide when and if to apply patches. Change happened on your schedule. S/4HANA operates differently, with regular quarterly updates and a continuous delivery model. Your CoE must shift from passive maintenance to active management of change.
It's worth noting that how much control you have over the timing and pace of these changes will depend on which S/4HANA deployment model you've chosen. Your options aren't one-size-fits-all, and the level of flexibility you retain varies accordingly. Regardless of your setup, the direction of travel is the same: your CoE needs to be ready to manage change, not wait for it.
S/4HANA success requires business leaders who understand the platform's capabilities and can drive adoption in their domains. The CoE facilitates this but doesn't own it alone.
This is perhaps the most fundamental shift.
Maintaining a Clean Core requires a completely different mindset and skillset. It requires CoE members who understand S/4HANA's extensive capabilities and can guide the business toward standard solutions.
This shift demands different ways of working, different governance models, and different stakeholder expectations.
The S/4HANA CoE must understand how these components work together and how to orchestrate them to deliver business value.
Organizations that don't invest in ongoing CoE development will find themselves with teams unable to exploit S/4HANA's value.
This requires different KPIs, different conversations with stakeholders, and a fundamentally different conception of the CoE's purpose.
If your current CoE shows the warning signs described above, transformation is necessary. But what does success look like?
Strong CoEs articulate the business outcomes and value they will deliver. This isn't a technical roadmap of patches and upgrades. It's a business-focused vision that connects SAP capabilities to strategic objectives.
Your roadmap should answer: What business capabilities will we enable? What inefficiencies will we eliminate? What competitive advantages will we create?
S/4HANA CoEs can't succeed as IT-only initiatives. They require active business sponsorship from senior leaders who understand the platform's strategic importance and are willing to drive adoption in their domains.
Joint ownership creates shared accountability for outcomes.
Clean Core adherence, change management, and continuous improvement all require robust governance. This governance ensures that guiding principles are followed, that decisions are made consistently, and that the right solutions are implemented.
Strong governance doesn't mean slow bureaucracy. It means clear decision rights, transparent processes, and appropriate escalation paths.
Effective S/4HANA CoEs actively look for new innovation and explore how it can be exploited. They monitor quarterly releases, assess new capabilities against business needs, and maintain a pipeline of improvement opportunities.
In ECC, it was often about maintaining the status quo. Nobody wanted to change much in case processes broke. The result was that innovation was never delivered, and custom code was never reviewed or remediated even when new standard functionality could replace it.
S/4HANA CoEs break this pattern, treating innovation as a core responsibility.
Data is the foundation of S/4HANA value, particularly for analytics and intelligent technologies. Strong CoEs ensure clear data ownership, robust data governance, and trusted data quality.
Without this foundation, advanced S/4HANA capabilities can't deliver their potential value.
Both CoE members and business users must continuously learn to use and exploit new features and innovation. Strong CoEs invest in training, create communities of practice, and build internal expertise systematically.
This isn't a one-time training event. It's an ongoing commitment to capability development.
Moving from an ECC-era CoE to an S/4HANA-ready team is one of the most underestimated aspects of SAP transformation. Organizations focus on technical migration but neglect the people, processes, and culture changes required for success.
The warning signs described above aren't permanent conditions. They're symptoms of a CoE model that may have worked in a different era but won't deliver value in the S/4HANA world.
If your CoE is stuck in reactive mode, disconnected from the business, or unable to drive adoption, the move to S/4HANA is an opportunity for fundamental transformation. But that transformation won't happen automatically. It requires deliberate design, investment, and leadership commitment.
Resulting IT helps organizations design and build Centres of Excellence that drive business value, not just system stability.
We work with you to assess your current state, define your target operating model, and execute the transformation needed for S/4HANA success. Contact us to discuss your CoE strategy.