Commissioned study finds payback in under six months and a six-month faster move to SAP S/4HANA

Boston, MA, Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- smartShift today announced the results of a 2026 commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study found that a composite organization using smartShift for SAP custom code transformation achieved a 254% ROI and $10.5 million in net present value over three years.

With SAP ECC mainstream support ending in 2027, many companies must move to SAP S/4HANA and fix large amounts of custom code along the way. Done manually, that work can take thousands of developer hours.

Forrester interviewed five smartShift customers and modeled their results as a composite organization with $60 billion in revenue and 150,000 custom ABAP objects. Over three years, that organization:

  • Avoided up to 99,840 manual developer hours of custom code remediation, worth $8.3 million
  • Retired 25% of its custom code as unused or redundant, saving $3.5 million in maintenance and support
  • Cut dual maintenance costs by 30% through automation
  • Finished its S/4HANA migration six months sooner, saving $1.1 million in legacy infrastructure costs
  • Reduced the likelihood of business disruption by 5% with more consistent, higher-quality custom code

"Our customers shouldn't have to commit large teams to years of manual custom code remediation to move to S/4HANA," said Vyom Gupta, President & COO at smartShift. "Forrester's findings show the business value of automation: faster migration, lower costs and reduced risk, freeing customers' teams to focus on innovation."

Key quotes from customers in the study:

"Something that would have taken us probably two years of remediation with an army of people and still having issues was done in six weeks." — DevOps manager, retail organization

"smartShift delivered quality. It yielded much better-quality results than if we did this work manually." — SAP delivery lead, grocery organization

The full study is available at https://smartshift.com/forrester-tei-study-2026.

About smartShift
smartShift is a global leader in SAP custom code transformation for SAP S/4HANA and Clean Core. They empower businesses to modernize their SAP landscapes, eliminate technical debt, and embrace future-ready development. Their automated and patented AI-powered solutions deliver secure, stable, and optimized code addressing all custom code issues, not just those prioritized for manual remediation, with a fixed-price, fixed-timeline, and 100% quality guarantee. Trusted by SAP's largest customers, smartShift has a proven track record of modernizing over 3,300 SAP systems and converting more than 4 billion lines of custom code.  Learn more at smartshift.com.

Contact:
Michelle Bissonnette
smartShift
mbissonnette@smartshift.com