smartShift SAP Custom Code Transformation Accelerates SAP Transformation And Reduces Migration Risk For Retail Organizations

smartShift commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying SAP Custom Code Transformation.¹ This abstract will focus on the retail industry’s use of smartShift SAP Custom Code Transformation and its value to their organizations.

Interviewees in the retail industry include:

• DevOps manager at a retail organization operating in Asia Pacific and Japan with $45 billion in annual revenue.

For retail organizations, SAP environments often sit at the center of critical business functions, including merchandising, supply chain management, inventory operations, finance, and store execution. As SAP ECC end-of-support deadlines approach, retail organizations are under pressure to modernize complex SAP landscapes while avoiding disruption to business operations. At the same time, years of customization have left many retailers with millions of lines of custom code that must be assessed, transformed, maintained, or retired before migration can proceed. The challenge is not simply migrating to SAP S/4HANA, but doing so while maintaining operational continuity, supporting ongoing business initiatives, and minimizing risk across highly interconnected retail operations. smartShift provides automated SAP custom code transformation and dual maintenance capabilities that can help retailers accelerate migration efforts, reduce manual remediation requirements, and establish a stronger foundation for future clean core initiatives.

smartShift SAP Custom Code Transformation is an AI-powered solution that helps organizations modernize complex SAP environments and accelerate migrations from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA. smartShift provides automated custom code transformation, custom code analysis, and dual maintenance capabilities that reduce manual developer effort while improving consistency and visibility across SAP custom codebases. By helping organizations identify redundant or unused custom code, standardize custom developments, and automate dual maintenance activities, smartShift enables IT teams to focus on migration-related testing, business process changes, and other SAP S/4HANA initiatives while supporting clean core objectives and reducing migration risk.

Investment Drivers For Retail Organizations

The retail organization adopted smartShift to accelerate its SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA migration while reducing developer effort, project risk, and operational disruption associated with transforming a highly customized SAP environment. Before working with smartShift, the organization faced several challenges in its legacy environment, including:

• Massive custom code remediation requirements threatened migration timelines. Before its smartShift investment, the organization maintained millions of lines of SAP custom code that required remediation before migrating to SAP S/4HANA. The interviewee explained that manually transforming this custom code would have required considerable time, resources, and coordination across large teams of developers. Furthermore, consistency became a concern because individual developers often approached remediation differently, making it difficult to achieve standardized outcomes across the custom codebase.

• Limited access to specialized resources constrained migration efforts. Large-scale custom code remediation would require extensive developer involvement at a time when the organization’s internal resources were already focused on ongoing operations and transformation activities. The interviewee explained that relying on manual remediation would have increased pressure on project timelines and created challenges with securing and coordinating the resources needed to support the migration. Therefore, their organization needed a solution that could automate remediation activities and reduce dependency on scarce technical expertise.

• Business continuity and project execution risks were major concerns. As a large multinational retailer with operations spanning numerous markets, the organization could not afford significant disruption during its SAP transformation. Delays in custom code remediation, inconsistent custom code quality, or transformation errors could impact critical business processes and jeopardize migration timelines that had already been communicated to executive leadership. The interviewee explained that manual remediation would have increased the likelihood of delays and forced their organization to make compromises in its migration approach to meet deadlines.

• Legacy custom code increased complexity and technical debt. After more than two decades of SAP customization, the organization’s custom codebase contained inconsistent custom coding approaches, hard-coded logic, and redundant custom developments accumulated over years of enhancement activity. The organization lacked clear visibility into which customizations remained necessary and which could be retired, thus increasing long-term maintenance burdens and making modernization efforts more difficult. The interviewee viewed the migration as an opportunity not only to achieve SAP S/4HANA compatibility but also to standardize custom code, improve security controls, and reduce technical debt across the environment.

SAP Custom Code Transformation Features

The retail organization chose to invest in smartShift SAP Custom Code Transformation for the following reasons:

• Automated custom code transformation capabilities that materially reduced the manual developer effort required to remediate millions of lines of SAP custom code. Automation was a practical alternative to sourcing a large number of specialized ABAP developers and manually managing a lengthy remediation effort.

• The ability to accelerate SAP S/4HANA migration timelines while maintaining predictable project delivery. smartShift demonstrated that it could remediate large volumes of custom code in weeks rather than years, which would allow the organization stay on track with critical migration milestones and planned go-live dates.

• Visibility into custom codebases to identify transformation requirements, redundant custom code, and modernization opportunities. smartShift’s ability to analyze and assess large volumes of custom code helped the organization better understand the scope of remediation work and identify opportunities to simplify its SAP environment.

• Automated dual maintenance capabilities that allowed ongoing business changes to continue throughout the migration project. By reducing the effort required to keep ECC and S/4HANA environments synchronized, smartShift helped the organization maintain development velocity and support business requirements during the transformation.

• Confidence in smartShift’s ability to deliver transformation work at scale and on predictable timelines. The organization gained confidence that smartShift could remediate millions of lines of custom code in weeks after seeing early results. smartShift’s ability to deliver on commitments and provide responsive support made it a trusted transformation partner throughout the migration.

Key Results For Retail Organizations

The results of the investment for the interviewee’s organization include:

Accelerate SAP S/4HANA migration while reducing developer constraints. The DevOps manager at the retail organization said smartShift played a critical role in enabling their organization’s SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA migration. Faced with millions of lines of custom code and an inability to source sufficient developer resources, it leveraged smartShift to automate code remediation, accelerate migration timelines, and allow internal teams to focus on other critical transformation activities. smartShift reduced one of the largest barriers to migration readiness while helping maintain confidence in key delivery milestones.

• Avoid up to 99,840 manual custom code transformation hours. Before working with smartShift, manually remediating 6.5 million lines of custom code would have required substantial developer effort and a large number of additional resources. The interviewee estimated that their organization would need 20 developers to support the effort but struggled to source the required talent. By automating code remediation, smartShift eliminated a major migration bottleneck and helped the organization complete work that likely would have taken two years otherwise.

• Allow internal developers to focus on higher-value transformation initiatives. Rather than dedicating scarce development resources to repetitive remediation work, the retail organization’s teams focused on business process changes, replacement solutions, and new S/4HANA-related development requirements. According to the interviewee, smartShift removed the burden of “monotonous” remediation activities and enabled developers to concentrate on initiatives that delivered greater business value throughout the migration program.

• Accelerate SAP S/4HANA migration timelines by six months. The retail interviewee explained that smartShift enabled their organization to maintain a board-approved migration schedule and would have struggled to meet planned go-live dates using manual remediation approaches. By removing custom code transformation as a bottleneck, smartShift enabled downstream testing and migration activities to begin sooner while helping the organization stay on track with critical project milestones.

Improve custom code quality while reducing transformation risk. For the retail organization, migration success depended not only on speed but also on the quality and consistency of custom code remediation activities. The interviewee explained that smartShift helped standardize custom code transformation across a highly customized SAP environment, reducing the variability that often accompanies large-scale manual remediation efforts. The organization also benefited from enhanced visibility into its custom codebase and stronger security and governance controls.

• Reduce the likelihood of business disruption by 5%. For the retail organization, avoiding transformation errors was particularly important because delays or disruptions could affect critical business operations and jeopardize key project milestones. The interviewee noted that manual remediation likely would have increased project risk and forced their organization to make compromises in its migration approach to meet deadlines. By delivering consistent and predictable code transformation, smartShift helped reduce operational and project execution risk.

• Improve code consistency, standardization, and security. The retail organization’s SAP environment had accumulated custom code over two decades of development activity involving numerous developers and coding approaches. smartShift helped standardize custom coding practices across the environment, introduce additional security checks, remove hard-coded elements, and improve overall custom code quality. According to the interviewee, these improvements would have been difficult to achieve through manual remediation efforts that focused primarily on achieving migration readiness.

Reduce technical debt and establish a stronger foundation for future modernization. Beyond supporting SAP S/4HANA migration goals, partnering with smartShift was an opportunity for the retail organization to improve its long-term health and SAP environment maintainability. Increased visibility into the custom code landscape enabled the organization to simplify its environment, reduce technical debt, and create efficiencies for future development and maintenance activities. These improvements positioned it for future modernization efforts and continued to generate value after the migration was complete.

• Decommission 25% of custom code to reduce ongoing maintenance requirements. The visibility provided by smartShift helped the retail organization identify redundant and unnecessary custom code that no longer delivered business value. As part of the transformation effort, the organization retired 1.2 million lines of custom code, reducing maintenance burdens, eliminating unnecessary complexity, and simplifying the SAP environment moving forward.

• Improve visibility into custom code to support future development initiatives. Following the migration, the retail organization immediately realized value from smartShift’s custom code standardization and analysis capabilities. The interviewee described a project that introduced a new custom code for the company, which would previously have required teams to manually search through large volumes of code. Using smartShift-generated tools and documentation, developers were able to identify required touchpoints from a centralized location and substantially reduce analysis effort, helping accelerate future projects while reinforcing the long-term value of the transformation.

Gain a trusted transformation partner. Looking beyond the technology itself, the interviewee highlighted the value of smartShift’s partnership and support throughout the migration journey. They noted that smartShift consistently delivered against commitments, remained highly responsive throughout the project lifecycle, and helped minimize stress associated with one of their organization’s largest technology initiatives. As a result, smartShift became a trusted extension of the migration team and a contributor to overall project success.

• Serve as a trusted and responsive migration partner. The interviewee described smartShift as highly collaborative and responsive throughout the migration and dual maintenance efforts. The team consistently delivered on commitments, quickly addressed issues, and supported project objectives without creating unnecessary friction. According to the interviewee, meeting critical migration milestones and ultimately achieving a successful S/4HANA go-live would have been much harder without smartShift’s support.