German optics giant ditches greenfield SAP migration
- ID
- 23097
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 10 Sep 2026, 5:45 PM
- Fetched
- 10 Sep 2026, 5:59 PM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/09/10/german-optics-giant-ditches-greenfield-sap-migration/5295251
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 10 Sep 2026, 6:00 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_startup_founders
What happened
Zeiss Group (€11.9B revenue) has abandoned its greenfield SAP S/4HANA migration after years of struggle, switching to a brownfield approach that moves its existing R/3 landscape to the new platform rather than rebuilding from scratch. The project, reportedly costing €200 billion per the article, began around 2020, and CIO Carsten Trapp had previously called the greenfield approach 'a lifetime opportunity to clean up' their 30-year-old customized R/3 system.
Why it matters
If a company of Zeiss's scale and resources can't make a clean-slate ERP migration work after years of effort, builders evaluating greenfield vs brownfield migrations for any large legacy system should seriously weigh the cost of process redesign bundled with platform change. The lesson: separating 'move the existing system' from 'redesign the processes' into phases may be the pragmatic path even when a clean rebuild looks architecturally superior.
Discussion angle
When does a greenfield rebuild become a sunk-cost trap, and how do you decide to cut losses and switch to incremental migration mid-project?