SAP's extended support window for ECC 6.0 has created a concentrated wave of S/4HANA migration activity among industrial operators. Maintenance and reliability teams are discovering that material master quality — specifically duplicate and inconsistent item records — creates significant data cleansing costs when surfaced during migration preparation.
Industry analysts estimate that material master rationalization represents 15 to 25 percent of total data migration effort in ERP transition projects for asset-intensive operators. For operators with 50,000 to 200,000 MRO SKUs, that translates to substantial consulting spend on activities that could be substantially reduced through a pre-migration diagnostic.
The S/4HANA unified data model has stricter requirements for material master consistency than ECC. Duplicate records that coexisted across multiple plant codes in ECC may require explicit resolution before migration to the S/4HANA structure.
