The SAP Upgrade Bottleneck smartShift Turns Into a Five-Week Job

Somewhere inside a multinational manufacturer, a 17-year-old block of ABAP code still decides how an invoice gets approved, a shipment gets released, or a factory order reaches the floor. It works. Nobody wants to touch it. Then the company decides to move from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, and that dependable old code becomes a migration problem with a payroll attached.

This is smartShift's chosen corner of enterprise software: the stubborn layer between buying the new system and safely getting there. The Boston-headquartered company extracts a customer's custom SAP code, maps its dependencies, finds incompatibilities and security problems, rewrites what needs rewriting, retires what is no longer used, validates the result, and loads the modernized code into the target environment. The customer keeps the business logic that made its SAP installation useful without asking an army of developers to repair millions of lines by hand.

The business began with a suspicious amount of repetition

Founder Stefan Hetges and a group of German engineers started smartShift in 2002 after working on legacy modernization for large companies. Their observation was less mystical than most origin stories: 80% to 90% of the work looked repeatable. If experts kept making the same categories of change, those decisions could become rules. In 2006 the company tightened its focus around SAP custom code, a niche so unromantic that it turned out to be defensible.

Today, smartShift says its engine has worked across more than 3,300 SAP systems and 3.5 billion lines of code. Its public customer references include Airbus, BMW, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Jabil, JBS USA, Beiersdorf, Evonik, Nilfisk and Gebr. Heinemann. These are not casual software buyers. They run sprawling SAP estates, often tuned over decades to fit factories, supply chains and finance teams that cannot simply stop while IT renovates the basement.

The important technical move happens off-system. smartShift parses the repository into a language-independent model and evaluates it against more than 240 rule sets, alongside SAP's own readiness findings. It can spot code that will fail against S/4HANA data structures, inefficient database calls, missing authorization checks, injection risks and objects that production no longer uses. The transformed code is then delivered back for testing. This is closer to an industrial repair line than a chatbot suggesting snippets.

At Jabil, the first thing to fail was the idea of doing it all by hand

The cleanest proof point is Jabil, the global manufacturing-services company. Its S/4HANA program put 5 million lines of custom code in scope. smartShift says it remediated the lot in five weeks, fixed 29,000 issues without manual intervention, saved 30,000 hours of effort and safely decommissioned 40% of obsolete code. The last number may be the most revealing. A migration is expensive enough before a company pays to carry dead software into its new home.

Gebr. Heinemann offers a second, smaller test of the method. The travel retailer had three central SAP systems, including one with more than 2.5 million lines and 50,000 ABAP objects. Each conversion took two weeks. Roughly 25,000 issues were addressed, and testing raised two tickets. JBS USA, working with Reply and cbs as part of a broader transformation, reported eliminating another 30,000 hours of manual custom-code conversion work.

“The predictability, quality, and speed of the HANA code conversion with smartShift exceeded my expectations.”Head of Administration & Information, Gebr. Heinemann

What changes a buyer's mind is usually not a dazzling interface. It is the spreadsheet for the manual alternative. In interviews for a study commissioned by smartShift, enterprise leaders described code transformation as a rare, high-risk event for which their organizations lacked deep experience. Manual plans brought high labor cost, inconsistent fixes, security exposure and a second headache: while one team builds S/4HANA, developers are still changing the live ECC system.

The clever product is the one that avoids a code freeze

smartShift calls its answer Dual Maintenance. It compares ongoing changes in the production environment, merges them into the S/4HANA project landscape, and remediates incompatibilities along the way. Without that bridge, teams must duplicate work manually or freeze development. A short freeze may be tolerable. A multi-year global rollout can turn one into a polite form of paralysis.

The rest of the portfolio surrounds that central transformation job. Code Analysis tells a customer what it owns and what can go. Code Security finds and repairs vulnerabilities. Consolidation harmonizes repositories after mergers or regional sprawl; carve-out work follows dependencies so a divested business takes the code it needs, not the entire family attic. Clean Core and ABAP Cloud services push retained custom logic toward SAP's current extension model. This is why smartShift fits beside an integrator rather than replacing one. The integrator handles process design, data, configuration and organizational change. smartShift takes the code lane.

So what does it cost?

There is no shelf price because no two SAP basements contain the same boxes. smartShift sizes the systems, custom objects and conflicts, adds the products required and the expected dual-maintenance period, then offers a fixed price and timeline. Its consolidation material describes an initial assessment followed by an SLA-backed proposal. The commercial argument is certainty: the customer buys a defined outcome instead of watching time-and-materials hours expand with every newly discovered dependency.

The market alternatives are broader than a tidy software comparison chart. An internal ABAP team can remediate manually. A global integrator can staff the problem. SAP provides its own analysis and migration utilities. Panaya, SNP CrystalBridge, Tricentis, Basis Technologies and other specialist platforms address overlapping pieces of change intelligence, testing, transformation or release management. smartShift's sharper claim is whole-repository automation with traceable changes, automatic delivery, synchronized landscapes and contractual accountability.

Partners make that focus more useful. IBM, DXC and NTT DATA can place the engine inside large programs. Basis Technologies pairs release automation with smartShift's retrofit work. SNP combines its transformation platform with smartShift for RISE with SAP projects. Syniti and Natuvion bring data expertise. In 2023, Ridgemont Equity Partners recapitalized the company on undisclosed terms, while management stayed invested. Ridgemont explicitly pointed to product innovation, global sales and a more recurring offering as the next act.

The part worth copying has nothing to do with SAP

The reusable playbook is to find an expert workflow where repetition is hiding in plain sight. Record the rules, build a complete model before making changes, automate the common cases deterministically, preserve human review for exceptions, and price the result rather than the hours. smartShift also measures usage over as much as 13 months, a quietly smart detail: a year-end routine that runs once annually is not dead code just because a 90-day sample never saw it.

Another useful lesson is to delete before converting. Every obsolete object removed reduces the transformation scope now, then cuts testing, maintenance and security exposure later. And the company does not pretend the surrounding program disappears. Business owners must still decide which logic matters. Integrators still redesign processes and migrate data. Customers still test. Automation compresses a specific bottleneck; it does not abolish enterprise reality.

That boundary matters. smartShift is least compelling when a company has little custom code, wants a greenfield replacement, or must rethink the business process itself. Rules cannot decide whether a 20-year-old pricing exception still belongs in the company. They can identify it, trace it and make it technically compatible. Someone who understands the business still has to say whether it deserves to live.

From migration project to permanent code discipline

smartShift's newer language stretches beyond the one-time S/4HANA move. The company now talks about lifecycle governance: keeping custom code ready for Clean Core, ABAP Cloud standards, security work and successive upgrades. Rudi Hois, who led product management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition, joined its advisory board in 2025. In 2026, smartShift's technical publishing increasingly connected custom business logic to enterprise AI agents. The point is sensible even without the fashionable wrapper: an agent is only as dependable as the systems and rules it touches.

That leaves smartShift in an odd but useful position. It is selling modernization without amnesia. Big companies customized SAP because the standard software did not fully express how they operated. Now SAP wants cleaner cores and faster upgrades, but the old logic still carries institutional memory. smartShift's wager is that enterprises would rather translate that memory than throw it away - and would happily pay to finish the translation before the migration calendar becomes the most expensive document in the building.