Off the price list, not off the roadmap
The question behind our July 2026 SAP Cloud ERP webinar was not a technical one. It was a wave of nervous emails, all with the same edge: a lot of Business by Design customers had heard their platform was being killed off, and did not know what to do about it.
Here is the precise position, corrected.
SAP have not formally announced that Business by Design will be an end-of-life solution. They have just announced that it will come off the net new name price list, essentially meaning that if you do not run SAP Business by Design today, you cannot buy it new. Toralf Andersson, Business Development Manager, Codestone
Nothing there says shutdown. The removal took effect on 20 April 2026, and it applies to new sales only: existing customers carry on exactly as they are and support continues as normal, a distinction confirmed by independent coverage of the announcement. The real risk now is reacting to a rumour before you have looked at the choice in front of you, so this piece sets out what changed, what the decision involves, and the no-cost way to start finding out where you stand.
What actually changed in the SAP stack
SAP has simplified matters, even if the news did not land that way. For SME and mid-market customers, the practical choice now sits between two products. SAP Business One is fit-to-requirement, a well-established solution mapped around how your business already works. SAP Cloud ERP public edition is fit-to-standard, built on SAP best practice.
Business by Design’s own roadmap now points towards SAP Cloud ERP, which is why current customers should treat it as the natural next step rather than a leap into the unknown.
One naming change trips almost everyone up, so it is worth clearing up here. SAP Cloud ERP is what used to be called S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The solution has not changed. Only the label has, and SAP’s own newsroom confirms SAP Cloud ERP as the name in current use.
SAP is not only for the giants
The objection I hear most from mid-market leaders is that SAP was built for the FTSE 100, not for a business their size.
A common misconception is that SAP is only for large enterprises. 80% of SAP customers are small to medium-sized organisations, so it has deep foundational applicability in the SME to mid-market sectors. Toralf Andersson, Business Development Manager, Codestone
SAP’s own newsroom puts the same figure at more than 80% of its customer base SAP News Center, 2023. That research and development budget, funded in large part by the world’s biggest companies, lands on the same platform a 200-person business can run. Scale changes the configuration, not the engineering behind it, and it is a distinction worth sitting with: plenty of the mid-sized businesses we work with across manufacturing, wholesale and professional services made exactly this assumption before finding otherwise.
So the useful question is not whether SAP fits a mid-market business. It is which SAP fits yours: Business One if you need the platform mapped to your processes, or SAP Cloud ERP if you would rather adopt a proven standard and spend your energy elsewhere.
Fit-to-standard versus fit-to-requirement
The two philosophies are easy to state and harder to choose between: a fit-to-requirement system such as Business One is built by mapping the platform to how your business already operates, whereas a fit-to-standard system such as SAP Cloud ERP asks you to adopt a proven standard and hold your processes to it as you grow.
SAP Cloud ERP is fit to standard. It is centred around adopting SAP best practice, a standardised framework that gives you long-term governance over your operational, financial and strategic processes. Toralf Andersson, Business Development Manager, Codestone
For a finance or IT leader, that trade pays off as the business grows. Less configuration means less to maintain, fewer bespoke quirks for your team to support, and stronger governance over financial and operational processes as headcount and complexity increase.
For a Business by Design customer, the real decision is not simply which product replaces the one you are on. It is whether you carry your existing customisations forward into the next platform, or use this moment to standardise instead.
The fear that keeps people on Business by Design
It is worth naming the fear before answering it. Customers stay on Business by Design longer than they need to because they dread a big-bang reimplementation, because cost feels uncertain until it is quoted, and because nobody wants to disrupt a system that is currently working well enough.
That caution is reasonable. Most finance and IT leaders have lived through at least one ERP project that ran long, ran over budget, or both, and the memory sticks.
The move off Business by Design is not that project, and the reasons why are practical rather than reassurance for its own sake.
Why the move is smoother than a rebuild
SAP now provides a tool that extracts your existing Business by Design scenarios and maps them directly into the Digital Discovery Assessment, so the comparison starts from what you already run rather than a blank page.
There is now a tool from SAP that extracts your current scenarios in Business by Design and maps them into the Digital Discovery Assessment, so we can compare apples with apples. You are going from one fit-to-standard solution to another, which is a much smoother process. Toralf Andersson, Business Development Manager, Codestone
Data migration tools speed up the build further. Because you are moving from one fit-to-standard solution to another, the change sits closer to an upgrade than a rebuild: you are not translating years of bespoke configuration into a new platform, you are carrying a standardised system across to its successor.
There are also SAP incentives aimed specifically at Business by Design customers to help with the commercials. Availability changes over time, so treat it as something to check rather than assume, but it is one more reason the timing may be better than the rumour suggests.
What the Digital Discovery Assessment actually is
The Digital Discovery Assessment, or DDA, is the practical starting point, so it is worth being precise about what it involves. It is an SAP tool that we run with you at Codestone: a guided checklist that captures your entities, geographies and functional requirements, then separates what you need on day one from what can wait for phase two or three.
The outputs are what matter to a leader weighing this up.
There is no cost. It is a free-of-charge exercise delivered by us at Codestone. It validates the fit, agrees a clear scope both sides can see, and lets us give you a fixed-price implementation. Toralf Andersson, Business Development Manager, Codestone
Two points should give you confidence in the process itself. It costs nothing, and the finished assessment is passed to SAP’s own brand guardian team, who confirm the proposed solution will meet your requirements before anyone commits to anything. From there, the fixed-price quote follows directly from what the assessment captured, so there are no surprises once the work begins.
We are talking hours rather than days, weeks and months. It is a relatively quick process, particularly if you are a Business by Design customer, where we can map those pre-existing scenarios over. Toralf Andersson, Business Development Manager, Codestone
What SAP Cloud ERP looks like day to day
Strategy aside, it is worth grounding this in the system Ian demonstrated live in the webinar. SAP Cloud ERP is role-driven: each person logs into a Fiori launchpad built around their job, rather than a generic menu they have to learn to navigate.
Each user is given a username and password, typically linked to their roles and responsibilities within the system, so the system drives the right information to that user. Ian Merry, Head of Presales, Codestone
A journal awaiting approval, a purchase order ready for sign-off, an invoice due for processing: the relevant tasks surface on screen because the system already knows what the role requires. Everyday work is grouped by process too, so a purchasing clerk or manager has the full flow to hand, with filters they can save as their own default view.
Reporting follows the same logic.
Taking a report that comes out of the box and building it to give you a more granular level of detail is very easy within the system. Ian Merry, Head of Presales, Codestone
Insight cards and tiles drill into live data, and standard reports such as the trial balance can be reshaped into whatever view the business needs, without anyone building something from scratch.
Where to start
None of this requires committing to a full programme before you understand your options. The sensible first move is the free Digital Discovery Assessment, or simply an informal conversation if you want to get better informed before deciding anything.
Existing Business by Design customers keep running exactly as they do today, so this is a planned decision rather than a fire drill, and there is no deadline forcing your hand. The businesses that navigate this well will be the ones who started evaluating early and on their own terms, rather than the ones who waited to be told what to do.
Book your free SAP Digital Discovery Assessment, or watch the full webinar on demand
