Zeiss Group has abandoned its "greenfield" migration to SAP's S/4HANA platform, opting instead for a "brownfield" approach that moves its existing R/3-based ERP landscape onto the new system rather than rebuilding processes from scratch. The industrial optics company, which posted revenue of around €11.9 billion, had pursued the more radical clean-core rebuild since around 2020 in an effort to overhaul decades of customisation, but the switch underscores how costly and difficult such transformations can prove even for large, well-resourced firms.

Reports suggest Zeiss had spent around €200 billion on the original project, though the company declined to confirm this figure, and SAP also declined to comment. Two years ago, Zeiss's CIO had championed the greenfield route as a "lifetime opportunity" to clean up systems "messed up" over 30 years, but the CFO of subsidiary Carl Zeiss Meditec has since flagged rising IT costs, expected to peak over the next two to three years. The move highlights broader industry unease about S/4HANA migrations ahead of the 2027 end of mainstream support for SAP's older ECC system, with research cited in the article showing 95 percent of legacy SAP users find building a case for migration challenging.