The SAP landscape is undergoing a major transformation, and organizations can no longer rely on legacy systems to stay competitive. Moving to the cloud, embarking on the RISE with SAP journey, leveraging new tools, centralizing document management, and automating finance processes are emerging as critical strategies for efficiency, innovation, and compliance.
Staying ahead requires more than routine system upgrades, it demands a strategic, forward-looking approach. By optimizing data, maintaining a clean core, enabling AI, and leveraging cloud capabilities, businesses can streamline migrations, reduce costs, and position themselves for a future-ready, intelligent SAP ecosystem.
This article explores the key SAP trends and actions organizations should prioritize in 2026 to maximize value and drive transformation.
1. Moving to RISE with SAP
With the 2027 deadline for SAP ECC support approaching, organizations are accelerating their transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, both Private and Public Editions, under the RISE with SAP initiative. Companies now face a critical decision: migrate early or risk last-minute disruption. Despite the urgency, many still hesitate, hoping to postpone migration. Experts strongly advise against waiting, highlighting the operational, technical, and strategic benefits of early adoption.
Preparing for a RISE migration involves more than just installing systems, it starts with data preparation. Ensuring that only relevant, timely, and compliant data is moved to the new environment lays the foundation for a smooth migration. Starting early makes the 2027 deadline achievable.
Maintaining a clean core minimizes system complexity, improves performance, and simplifies future upgrades. Regardless of whether organizations adopt a greenfield, brownfield, or hybrid approach, data archiving is a critical step. Reducing data volumes lowers migration costs and ensures regulatory compliance.
Data volume management also requires planning for legacy systems. Organizations must prepare to decommission outdated systems while securely preserving historical data, eliminating unnecessary infrastructure, and reducing maintenance overhead.
Migrating to the cloud brings flexibility, scalability, and innovation. Cloud-based SAP environments allow businesses to adapt quickly, scale resources on demand, and cut infrastructure costs. AI and machine learning enable automation, predictive insights, and faster data-driven decisions. Seamless integration with other cloud tools enhances collaboration, accessibility, and security while supporting compliance through continuous updates and advanced protection protocols.
Getting started in 2026: Conduct a thorough SAP landscape assessment, including systems, data, and processes, to create a strategic migration roadmap. Identify which data should move to the new environment and which can be stored cost-effectively with access preserved. Less data in the primary system means lower costs, faster migration, and retention compliance.
2. Unlocking Innovation with SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)
SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is quickly becoming essential for SAP customers looking to innovate in 2026.
“SAP BTP serves as the foundation for innovation, integration, and extensibility across the SAP ecosystem,” explained Deepak Sood, CEO of Auritas. “With BTP, you get database services, analytics, application development, and AI automation in a single, centralized platform. Integration Suite further connects SAP and non-SAP systems, providing real-time operational visibility.”
BTP allows organizations to extend SAP solutions and integrate non-SAP systems without disrupting core processes. This supports a clean core strategy, reduces complexity, and accelerates adoption of new technologies.
BTP also provides AI, machine learning, and analytics capabilities, turning data into actionable insights. Low-code and no-code tools empower teams to innovate quickly without heavy technical dependencies. Centralized governance ensures data consistency, security, and compliance while providing administrators full visibility into system usage.
The platform’s usage-based payment model enables scaling costs with consumption. However, many organizations leave significant portions of prepaid credits unused due to overestimated requirements or unclear strategies. Careful planning and credit allocation are critical to avoid wasted investment.
As part of your 2026 SAP strategy, explore BTP extensions and applications like Data ASSIST for automated data archiving and Data GUARD for legacy system decommissioning. Properly leveraging BTP can significantly increase ROI and accelerate innovation.
3. Centralized Document Management & AI Enablement
As businesses move to cloud-based SAP systems, document management and accessibility are essential for operations and AI enablement. Enterprise data is often fragmented across multiple systems, creating silos where unstructured content, contracts, invoices, emails, images, is disconnected from structured SAP data. This limits visibility and increases compliance risk.
Centralizing documents in a single, secure repository solves these challenges. A unified content platform links documents to business processes, providing context and improving accessibility. Organized content enables AI and machine learning tools to analyze patterns, extract insights, and automate workflows, reducing errors and manual effort. Tasks such as automated invoice processing, contract analysis, and compliance reporting benefit particularly from this approach.
The year 2026 is pivotal: the SAP ECC support deadline is near, pushing migrations to S/4HANA, while global data regulations are tightening. Businesses that fail to centralize content risk inefficiencies and compliance gaps.
Solutions like OpenText Extended ECM (xECM) for SAP integrate unstructured content directly into business processes, improving productivity, governance, and AI readiness. xECM supports metadata management, version control, and secure access across users.
“Centralizing and organizing all unstructured and structured content now ensures that when your ECC is retired, you’re ready to fully leverage S/4, BTP, AI, and other solutions,” said David Boeckle, CSO at Auritas.
Next Step: Explore unstructured data management tools like OpenText xECM to centralize content, enable AI automation, and prepare for S/4HANA and cloud SAP environments in 2026.
4. Finance Automation for Accuracy, Speed, and Compliance
Automation in finance drives accuracy, speed, and regulatory compliance, not just efficiency. Traditional processes, procure-to-pay (P2P), accruals, tax calculations, are often manual, error-prone, and slow. Intelligent automation transforms routine tasks, freeing finance teams to focus on strategic activities like risk management and scenario planning.
Global operations are becoming increasingly complex, with more suppliers, data, and regulatory obligations. Manual processes cannot keep pace with evolving tax regulations, real-time reporting mandates, and accelerated close cycles.
Organizations can automate solutions across the finance function. Invoice processing supports PO matching, exception handling, and workflow routing directly within SAP. AI-driven accruals reduce period-end workload by up to 80% and improve reporting accuracy. Real-time tax automation ensures compliance and mitigates risk.
For P2P, solutions such as Ariba Guided Buying for sourcing, OpenText VIM for invoice automation, and AI Accrual provide end-to-end automation. Together, they reduce manual effort, enforce compliance, accelerate cycle times, and deliver real-time visibility into finance operations.
To capitalize on automation, organizations should focus on high-impact areas, P2P, accruals, and tax compliance, while integrating automation into their ERP migration roadmap. Building governance and skill sets to manage automated workflows is crucial for operational efficiency, compliance, and data integrity.
5. SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Modernization
SAP Business Warehouse (BW) modernization is becoming a key trend in digital transformation. Once the backbone of SAP analytics, traditional BW deployments, often on older databases with unoptimized data flows, can slow innovation.
Modernization is no longer just maintenance; it is foundational to a future-ready SAP ecosystem. Organizations are migrating to SAP BW/4HANA, leveraging HANA’s in-memory processing for performance gains while preserving existing business logic. However, this path has limits for innovation, integration, and AI.
For a more robust solution, enterprises are adopting Business Data Cloud (BDC) and BW Private Cloud Edition (BW PCE). This hybrid BW + SAP Datasphere architecture preserves a governed data backbone while enabling cloud-based integration, self-service analytics, and alignment with SAP’s cloud-first strategy, all without disruptive rebuilds.
Optimization is critical. “Organizations are looking for a data volume management strategy when moving to BW PCE,” explained Deepak Sood. “Data archiving and legacy decommissioning can reduce BW footprints by 40–80%, improving query performance and minimizing costs.”
Looking ahead, BW modernization will remain central to SAP strategies, driven by cloud adoption, rising data volumes, and the need for architectures supporting advanced analytics, automation, and AI.
Getting Started
As organizations approach the 2027 SAP ECC support deadline, the time to act is now. Early planning and execution to strategies can help unlock the full potential of your SAP ecosystem and take advantage of the new wave of AI tools.
2026 is the pivotal year to lay the foundation for this transformation. Organizations that embrace these initiatives now will reap long-term benefits in performance, cost efficiency, and innovation, turning migration and modernization into a true competitive advantage.
