Federal government agencies with complex SAP ECC enterprise resource planning environments now have until the end of 2030 to migrate off them.
Digital Transformation Agency CEO Chris Fechner said that last year’s renewed whole-of-government agreement with SAP included extended support for ECC.
Mainstream support for ECC – ERP Central Component – runs until 2027. A premium option extends support through 2030 and the DTA has taken that option.
Fechner said this will “allow a longer window of transition for those people who are currently on on-premises ECC instances of SAP but will run out of support.”
Where agencies transition to is an individual choice based on current government policy.
A natural – though complex – upgrade path is to S/4HANA, although other non-SAP ERPs can also be implemented.
Fechner said there are around 35 production instances of SAP across the federal government.
Some are shared services instances, bringing the total number of entities reliant on SAP up to about 90.
For those that want to remain on SAP, the DTA said it is convening a forum with the vendor to talk impacted agencies through their upgrade options.
The complexity of larger SAP environments – at Defence, Services Australia, Australian Taxation Office, Home Affairs and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade – is complicating migration planning, however.
“Many of those entities – ATO and Services Australia especially – embed SAP into their frontline operations,” Fechner said.
“Services Australia, for instance, runs their customer relationship management and payment gateways for their social services payments through SAP, [while the] ATO has deep integrations into revenue collection which is part of their core purpose.
“So it’s not just their core financials, HR and legal [functions that are impacted].”
Fechner said that the DTA is working especially with these larger agencies to try to unwind legacy integrations and interdependencies.
“Part of the thing we’re looking at doing is supporting agencies in simplifying their ERP environments so we don’t run into another support cliff as we’ve run into with this,” he said.
“By standardising the use of the application – so going back to the core capabilities and not extending them, which was commonplace in the 80s and 90s when most of these were designed – means they’re easier to implement, easier to keep current and potentially easier to switch between ERP solutions.
“We believe the planning work on this is setting us up to not repeat the problems that we’ve had with very large, complex, monolithic ERP solutions being delivered in agencies and being very difficult to transition out of.”
Extended support through to the end of 2030 will help with the transition.
There have been recent murmurs at the vendor of a new conditional support offer through to 2033, which could help larger agencies that struggle with moving away from ECC.
Fechner raised another potential option to keep agencies operating on older SAP environments for some time, although the architectural specifics of this option were not immediately clear.
Clarity is being sought from a DTA spokesperson.
“What we may have to do in some cases with agencies is have them take an interim step where they move into a technically different environment but basically utilise the same version that they’ve got, so it’s like abstracting it from that particular version,” Fechner said.
“That would incur an additional expense as a transition step, but it may be a safety mechanism for agencies that can’t handle the complexity of that migration.”