Mistakes enterprises make when moving to S/4HANA—and how to avoid them.

Migrating to SAP S/4HANA is one of the most significant projects an organization can undertake. Beyond the technical upgrade, it’s a chance to rethink how you manage data for efficiency, compliance, and cost control. Yet, many companies stumble in one key area: archiving.

Handled correctly, archiving can shrink database size, speed up migration, reduce licensing costs, and ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR. But handled poorly, it can lead to migration delays, ballooning costs, and loss of trust in the system.

1. Lack of Clear Objectives and Retention Strategy

The Mistake: Many organizations start archiving with no defined business objectives. Is the goal to reduce database size, improve performance, or ensure compliance? Without clarity, projects drift, scope balloons, and results underwhelm.

Industry Insight: Failure often comes from a missing residence strategy—no clear rules on how long data stays in the database before it is archived. This leads to inconsistent practices, gaps in compliance, and wasted effort.

The Fix:

• Define measurable goals (e.g., “Reduce DB by 40% before migration”).

• Establish clear retention policies aligned with business and legal requirements.

• Document your archiving scope upfront (which objects, which years, which entities).

• Involve compliance and audit teams early.

2. Treating Archiving as a Purely Technical Project

The Mistake: When archiving is positioned as an IT exercise, business teams often resist. Users fear losing access to historical data, especially for audits and reporting. This resistance can stall projects or force partial rollbacks.

Industry Insight: Business stakeholders must be brought into the design phase, not just IT. If users don’t trust the archive, they won’t support the migration.

The Fix:

• Treat archiving as a business + IT initiative.

• Communicate clearly: data is not being deleted, it’s being managed more efficiently.

• Provide easy access methods (e.g., ArchiveLink, OpenText viewers, AI retrieval assistants).

• Pilot with a department to show value before rolling out broadly.

3. Poor Migration Readiness and Oversight of Data Complexity

The Mistake: Companies often jump into migration without preparing their data landscape. Old, inconsistent, or redundant data bloats the system, leading to longer migration times, higher HANA licensing costs, and downstream integrity issues.

Industry Insight: Treating migration as “lift-and-shift” without proactive archiving is risky. Data volume directly impacts migration speed, system performance, and business continuity.

The Fix:

• Perform data profiling early: understand volumes, duplicates, inconsistencies.

• Run TAANA or similar tools to analyze object size by fiscal year.

• Prioritize high-volume objects (FI_DOCUMNT, CO_ITEM, MM_EKKO, etc.).

• Archive before migration—moving terabytes of unnecessary data is avoidable cost.

4. Insufficient Testing and Validation

The Mistake: Organizations assume archiving will “just work” once configured. But failing to rigorously test can result in broken workflows, inaccessible documents, and major issues post go-live.

Industry Insight: The lack of robust testing is one of the most common pitfalls in S/4HANA migrations. The same applies to archiving—without test automation and validation, companies risk compliance breaches and user frustration.

The Fix:

• Build automated test cases for archive retrieval, reporting, and business transactions.

• Involve business users in UAT (User Acceptance Testing).

• Test retrieval across systems: ECC, S/4, OpenText.

• Validate legal compliance reports (tax, audit, GDPR).

5. Ignoring Specialized Tools and Expert Guidance

The Mistake: To save money, some firms rely on manual archiving setups or inexperienced teams. This often leads to misconfigured retention rules, audit failures, and costly rework.

Industry Insight: A warning against relying purely on manual migration approaches. Specialized archiving tools and experienced consultants accelerate timelines, reduce errors, and ensure compliance.

The Fix:

• Use policy-driven tools for retention and destruction.

• Leverage expert consultants who’ve done multiple S/4 migrations.

• Consider add-ons like PBS, Neev, Auritas, TJC tools for seamless approach and advanced reporting and compliance.

• Automate wherever possible (e.g., schedule archive jobs with ILM policies).

Final Thoughts

Archiving is not just a technical checkbox in your S/4HANA migration—it’s a strategic enabler.

Done right, it:

• Reduces migration cost and duration.

• Improves S/4HANA performance.

• Ensures compliance with data privacy regulations.

• Builds user trust in the new system.

Avoiding these five pitfalls requires early planning, strong governance, business engagement, and expert guidance.