SAP will end mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 at the end of 2027. That much is settled. What is less clear to most finance and IT leaders is what actually happens if nothing has changed by then.
What ends, and what does not
Your system does not stop working. Mainstream maintenance ending means SAP stops shipping legal and regulatory updates, stops delivering new functionality, and moves support to extended maintenance at a premium. For a business running payroll or tax reporting through SAP, the regulatory updates are the part that matters, because a system that cannot file correctly is a system you cannot use.
The three routes
Organisations broadly take one of three paths. A brownfield conversion keeps existing configuration and data and moves it onto S/4HANA. A greenfield implementation starts clean and rebuilds processes to standard. Extended maintenance buys time at additional cost without solving anything.
Which is right depends on how much of your current configuration is genuinely worth keeping, and that is a question about your system rather than about industry best practice.
Where to start
Before choosing a route, run an assessment on your own estate: how much custom code exists, how much of it is actually used, and what condition the data is in. Two companies of the same size in the same sector routinely produce completely different answers, and the answer changes the cost by an order of magnitude.
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