In September 2025, SAP confirmed that Business ByDesign, its cloud ERP for mid-sized companies, comes off the price list for new customers in April 2026. For the several thousand still running it, many in German-speaking Europe, nothing changes operationally. Support continues, there is no announced end date for maintenance, and the system runs finance, procurement, inventory and planning exactly as before. The signal is easy to ignore, which is where the opportunity is missed.
A vendor stepping back invites a wave of aggressive marketing, and it has already begun. Implementation partners push urgency: development has stopped, the ecosystem is thinning, migrate now. Third-party support firms push the opposite: nobody can force you off, stay put and pay less. Both sell their own service, and both happen to be correct.
It was never about the software
The key question is about the operating model, not the platform. A company runs the same model for years because nothing forces a review. The demand forecast is never quite trusted, so the real numbers get reworked in a spreadsheet and the monthly S&OP reconciliation happens outside the ERP entirely. Those workarounds become the actual process, known to one or two people and documented nowhere, with no budget to redesign them. A reimplementation is the one event that reopens them: budget is approved, every process is re-specified anyway, and for a few months the operating model is genuinely on the table. Once scope is signed off, it closes for a decade.
The pull is towards rebuilding what you had, because these decisions fall between two parties who each assume the other owns them. The system integrator is paid to configure the platform to your specification, not to ask whether the specification is right. The vendor sells the licence. Left in that gap, the old model is rebuilt unchanged on expensive new software, workarounds and all.
Decide first, then shop
The fix is a matter of sequence. Decide how you want to plan and operate, then shop for a system that fits. Do it the other way round and the tool in front of you shapes every answer before the question is asked. The platform choice, whether Business One, S/4HANA Cloud, Odoo, Dynamics 365 Business Central or Abacus, is the most visible decision and the one to make last.
This is not a technical task, and it has to happen before scope freezes, because anything deferred to “after go-live” never happens. Four decisions carry the weight. Which workarounds you drop, and which are load-bearing enough to build into the new system properly. What your demand planning and S&OP process should actually look like, decided independently of the tool and then tested against what the platform does as standard. Whether you use the migration to clean the master data or carry the existing mess across intact. And who owns these decisions, separately from the technical build, because an unowned decision defaults to the integrator’s template.
None of this needs an enterprise-scale programme. The aggressive pitch assumes a steering committee and a two-year roadmap, but for a mid-sized business with a lean team the hard part is judgement, not build: deciding how demand planning, inventory and S&OP should actually run. That thinking can be done without halting the day job, and it makes the eventual platform lighter and the migration shorter.
Set your own timeline
That work takes time, which is the argument for starting early. With no forced date, the real risk is drift: nothing is burning, so the decision is never urgent and never made. A supported platform is not the same as one that keeps up. Development has stopped, so each new requirement, a tighter inventory policy or a better forecast, is met with another spreadsheet, multiplying the very thing a migration is meant to clear. Set your own trigger instead: tie the move to a moment you control, a contract renewal or a planning change you needed anyway, and start the operating-model work a year ahead of it.
