SAP's upgrade took a US city 14 months. Starting it took eight years.
Charlottesville, Virginia moved two decades of city data from ECC 6, its old on-premises SAP system, installed on site rather than rented as a cloud service.
It moved them to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP's newer cloud system, StateScoop reported on Monday. One reason was that support for the old system ends in 2027.
The project ran from July 2024 until September 2025, when the new system went into use.
The city's IT director called it "eight years in the making through a lot of starts and stops."
Over those years, Charlottesville went through "five or six city managers". Some city leaders questioned whether it needed an ERP system at all and did not understand what SAP did. The city commissioned a study comparing SAP, other vendors, a mix of vendors and no ERP. It recommended staying with SAP.
Change management took "really the last half of the project, probably those last six, seven months," the director said.
Since go-live, staff use SAP's newer Fiori screens, and the city is testing AI to find bottlenecks in permit processing.
In your organisation, how did the time to approve leaving ECC, SAP's older system, compare with the project itself?
Image: AI-generated.
Sources
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