SAP Business ByDesign still works but growth changes the question
SAP Business ByDesign (ByD) has been a strong ERP platform for many midmarket organisations. It delivers integrated finance and operational capability with relatively low technical overhead and has supported growth well beyond entry level systems.
This is the first in a three part series exploring when organisations outgrow SAP Business ByDesign and why SAP Cloud ERP (S/4HANA) Public increasingly becomes the logical next step.
When organisations start talking about moving away from ByD, it’s rarely because the system has failed.
The more common and more strategic question is:
Has the business outgrown what a midmarket ERP was designed to support?
When growth quietly introduces friction
As organisations scale, complexity tends to creep in gradually:
- More legal entities and geographies
- More demanding supply chain or manufacturing requirements
- Stronger expectations around governance, controls and auditability
To cope, many organisations introduce:
- Workarounds to address functional gaps
- Satellite systems added “temporarily”
- Manual controls layered over automated processes
Individually, these decisions are rational. Over time, they accumulate into technical debt. They are fragile solutions that are harder to maintain, harder to change and increasingly dependent on a shrinking pool of specialist knowledge.
ByD isn’t broken. But it can reach a point where the business is working around the system rather than with it.
SAP’s direction is a signal
SAP’s cloud ERP investment focus is now firmly centred on SAP Cloud ERP (S/4HANA) Public. This is where SAP is building:
- Industry specific functionality
- Sustainability and carbon accounting capabilities
- Regulatory and compliance innovation
SAP has also stated that SAP Business ByDesign will be removed from the pricelist for net new customers from April 2026, while existing customers continue to receive support and updates. This is not an end of maintenance announcement but it does matter for long term ecosystem momentum, partner focus and skills availability.
The real inflection point
SAP Business ByDesign continues to work well for many organisations today. But growth rarely announces itself clearly. It shows up quietly in spreadsheets, reconciliations, side systems and “temporary” fixes that never quite go away.
At some point, the question shifts from “Can ByD still cope?” to
“Are we adapting the business to the system more than the system to the business?”
That moment is often when organisations start looking more seriously at SAP S/4HANA Cloud even if the conclusion, at least for now, is to stay where they are.
In Part 2 of this series, we look at what moving to SAP S/4HANA Cloud actually involves and why it’s best understood as a reset, not an upgrade.
Click below to read part 2:
» Moving from SAP Business ByDesign to SAP S/4HANA Cloud isn’t an upgrade. It’s a reset
