Prashant Parekh, SAP Analytics Practice
When three S/4HANA proposals come back with wildly different timelines and prices, it’s rarely because vendors are padding differently — usually each one has silently answered two separate questions as though they were one. Deployment model determines where the system runs: GROW’s standardized public cloud, RISE’s more customizable private cloud, or on-premise for specific regulatory cases. Migration path determines what happens to your existing configuration and data on the way across: a greenfield rebuild, a brownfield conversion, or a selective hybrid mix. The two are independent, and conflating them is exactly why comparing vendor quotes side by side so often doesn’t work.
The migration-path decision is worth making first, because it rests on a measurable fact rather than a judgment call: what proportion of your current configuration and custom code is actually worth carrying forward. A short code and configuration audit usually answers that, and in most manufacturing estates a large share of custom code turns out to be unused or replaceable with standard S/4HANA functionality. A high proportion of genuinely valuable configuration points toward brownfield; a low proportion points toward greenfield; a wide spread across modules, the common case, points toward a selective approach.
There are legitimate exceptions — carve-outs and divestitures effectively require greenfield, regulated industries with validated systems weigh the cost of change differently, and sometimes an organization deliberately picks the harder path as a forcing function for overdue change. But the core question to bring into any vendor conversation is simple: which deployment model and which migration path are you assuming, and what evidence did you use to assume it?
Want a second opinion on your own path? Get in touch with our team.