Zeiss Group has scrapped its plans for a greenfield enterprise resource planning migration to SAP's latest S/4HANA platform after years of difficulty attempting to transition away from an aging R/3 system. The industrial optics firm, which generates roughly €11.896 billion in revenue, announced it would "realign" its ERP migration strategy by shifting its current landscape to the new platform through a so-called "brownfield" migration instead. The project reportedly began around 2020, with estimates suggesting the company has invested €200 million in the effort to leave behind R/3, the earliest version of which launched in 1992.
Two years earlier, CIO Carsten Trapp had publicly supported the greenfield approach, describing it as "a lifetime opportunity to clean up" because the firm had "messed up our R/3 system over the last 30 years." He explained that moving to S/4HANA would allow the technology team to establish "all processes cleanly in the SAP standard from the start." However, financial pressures mounted as the project progressed. In December of last year, Justus Felix Wehmer, CFO of major subsidiary Carl Zeiss Meditec, noted that administration expenses had climbed due to elevated IT costs tied to introducing the new ERP system. By May, he indicated these expenses would reach their highest point "over the next two to three years" because of the SAP project. The company declined to confirm the €200 million spending figure, and SAP did not provide comment.
A company spokesperson told The Register that Zeiss "continuously evaluates larger projects and adapts them flexibly as conditions change," adding that the ERP migration "has now been realigned to achieve faster progress in the transformation." According to the spokesperson, the new approach involves migrating the existing ERP landscape to SAP S/4HANA as a first step, with individual segments then building on this foundation with custom-configured solutions. The outcome will be "a group-wide core system with segment-specific applications that best reflect the similarities and differences in the processes," the spokesperson said.
The shift highlights the difficulty many organizations face when attempting greenfield ERP migrations, which SAP has long advocated through its clean-core methodology that abandons old customizations while adopting new processes simultaneously. This combined business process and technology overhaul can become challenging, expensive, and lengthy for customers. Mainstream support for ECC, which replaced R/3 as SAP's primary ERP offering in the early 2000s, is scheduled to end in 2027, creating urgency for legacy users. Yet SAP has found it difficult to persuade users of the business value in migrating from legacy systems like R/3 and ECC to S/4HANA, despite promises of greater speed and flexibility through its in-memory database. Although S/4HANA debuted in 2015, research from Freeform Dynamics found that as recently as last year, 95 percent of legacy users reported that building a positive migration case requires significant effort or proves genuinely challenging.
By choosing a brownfield path, Zeiss will preserve more of its existing configurations while upgrading the underlying platform, allowing segments to tailor solutions incrementally rather than overhauling everything at once. The company maintains an existing relationship with Microsoft and is moving its ERP systems to the cloud on Azure, as Microsoft announced in 2024. The realignment reflects a broader recognition that the promise of a clean-slate transformation often collides with operational realities and financial constraints. Organizations facing similar deadlines may find themselves weighing the appeal of standardized processes against the pragmatic need to protect existing investments and minimize disruption. The pivot underscores how technical ambition must ultimately bend to the complexities of execution and the pressures of the balance sheet.