End of ECC maintenance in 2027: what West African companies must decide.

Regional groups still running on ECC know it: the vendor has set the date, and the date will not move again. What remains open is what each company will do with the time left. Endure it, by subscribing to extended maintenance with no plan behind it. Or use it as an alignment point that few transformations ever get: the whole leadership team, every subsidiary, one shared deadline. The difference between the two is decided in the next twelve months.

Why waiting costs more here than elsewhere

Postponing is the first reflex. Extended maintenance exists for that, and it can be a rational choice, provided it is backed by a written trajectory. The problem is that it often serves as an alibi. And in our region, the meter runs on lines that European analyses never mention.

• The budget is in foreign currency. Licences, cloud subscriptions and part of the services are billed in euros or dollars. The CFA franc is pegged to the euro, which protects against exchange-rate risk vis-à-vis Europe, but not against a global rise in vendor prices over the years. Deciding early means negotiating early.
• Local skills are scarce. Profiles able to lead an S/4HANA conversion, migrate data or architect extensions are few in the sub-region. As the deadline approaches, everyone will be looking for the same people at the same time. Latecomers will pay the price of scarcity.
• The legacy gets heavier. Every custom development added to an ECC on borrowed time, often for a SYSCOHADA statement or a national tax rule, is a debt the migration will have to repay.
• The opportunity cost accumulates. As long as the core stays frozen, real-time analytics, automation and AI on enterprise data stall at the pilot stage. That delay does not show up in the maintenance line. It shows up in years of capabilities never built.

Three paths, and no doctrine

The debate readily pits technical conversion, “fast and risk-free”, against new implementation, “ambitious but endless”. Reality is less clear-cut. There are three families of trajectories, and the right choice depends on your existing landscape, not on a dogma.

Conversion

Converting the existing system to SAP S/4HANA preserves history, processes and developments. That is its strength and its limit. The approach suits companies whose ECC core has remained healthy: processes harmonised across subsidiaries, custom developments under control, correct data. Converting a disorderly system is like moving house without opening the boxes. The mess arrives intact in the new home, where it costs more.

New implementation

Starting from a new system allows you to adopt SAP S/4HANA standards, purge years of custom developments and rebuild processes on a clean foundation. It is the most transformative path, and therefore the most demanding. It assumes the company agrees to change its ways of working as much as its tool. A new implementation run as a disguised conversion, where every departure from the legacy is renegotiated line by line, adds up the costs of both approaches without the benefits of either.

Selective transition

Between the two, selective approaches make it possible to sort: keep what has value, history or mature processes, and rebuild what no longer does. For multi-entity groups in UEMOA, where one subsidiary runs on ECC, another on a local ERP and a third on spreadsheets, this is often the relevant route. It is also the most demanding in terms of architecture, and the least forgiving of improvisation.

Before being a migration date, 2027 is a deadline for deciding how the group wants to operate: one way to close, one way to buy, one view of the customer.

What is specific to the sub-region

An S/4HANA trajectory in West Africa is scoped with the same methods as anywhere else. But five topics weigh more heavily here, and a scoping that overlooks them produces an unworkable plan.

• Multi-entity UEMOA groups. One currency, the CFA franc, but eight national tax systems, distinct reporting obligations and invoicing rules specific to each State. The model of legal entities, charts of accounts and reporting must be settled before any configuration. That is a finance leadership decision, not an integrator’s choice.
• Revised SYSCOHADA. The accounting framework of the OHADA area imposes its statements: balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, notes. These statements must come out of the system, not out of an Excel rework. The question to ask at scoping: what share of the localisation is covered by the standard, and what share will have to live in a governed extension?
• Hosting and connectivity. Private cloud, public cloud or on-premise: the choice is read in the latency from your sites, in data location under Law No. 2008-12 and the CDP, and in the monthly cost in foreign currency. We devote a dedicated viewpoint to it.
• Local skills. A program that relies entirely on teams brought in from outside leaves, at its end, a company unable to keep its system alive. Knowledge transfer to your teams and to local support must be in the plan, with names and dates.
• The budget in foreign currency. Subscriptions, licences and hosting are often paid outside the zone. The financing plan must factor this in over the whole life of the contract, not just the project phase.

How to decide, and at what level

The choice of path follows from an honest diagnosis, conducted on four dimensions. The state of processes: are they harmonised, or does each subsidiary live its own life? The weight of custom developments: what do they really do, and for whom? Data quality: can it be migrated as is without importing the liabilities? And absorption capacity: what can the teams take on, alongside their operations?

Above all, the decision must be taken at the right level. As long as the S/4HANA trajectory remains an IT department file, it will be arbitrated on IT costs, and the cheapest short-term scenario will win. We say it plainly: this is an executive leadership decision, because it commits the group’s operating model. Which processes to standardise across countries? Which differences to preserve because they create value? What architectural discipline, the clean core, to impose so that the new system does not reproduce the drift of the old one?

Where to start in 2026

The first step is neither a call for tenders nor a choice of tool. It is a short scoping phase that delivers three things to leadership. To locate your starting point in five minutes, our twelve-question self-assessment is a useful prelude.

• An unsparing assessment of the existing system: processes, custom developments, data, SYSCOHADA and tax localisation, costs, risks. A diagnosis that draws consequences, rather than one more inventory.
• Scenarios that are genuinely compared, in full costs and in foreign currency, with their explicit conditions for success. A scenario without conditions for success is a sales pitch.
• A roadmap in waves, sequenced according to dependencies between countries and absorption capacity, where each stage delivers intermediate value. Programs that produce nothing before their end are the ones the first budget squeeze interrupts.

This scoping changes the balance of power. The group that knows what it wants, in what order and on what terms, chooses its partners instead of enduring them. And that is where the constraint becomes an opportunity: the 2027 deadline offers what no program easily obtains, the alignment of every subsidiary on a single date. It would be a shame to make it just a migration.

To go further: our SAP · S/4HANA & ERP offering, our finance expertise for the SYSCOHADA side, and a reference journey for a regional group, presented as an illustration.