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Nowadays, 59% of companies are fully or partially operating on SAP S/4HANA – a jump of 13 percentage points in just one year – as businesses race to replace older SAP systems before official support for legacy platforms ends in 2027. According to the Transforming SAP Processes Through Automation: 2026 Trends and Challenges report by Precisely and the Americas’ SAP Users Group (ASUG), many of these migration projects are already facing delays and budget overruns, while data quality remains one of the most underestimated problems during the transition.
A separate analysis published by The Silicon Partners in early 2026 warned that demand for experienced SAP S/4HANA specialists could reach three times the available supply by 2027. Companies are particularly struggling to find senior architects and technical consultants capable of rebuilding large reporting and data systems without disrupting daily business operations.
German SAP consultant Baris Ozcan has spent nearly two decades working inside exactly these kinds of environments. He has worked on SAP reporting and analytics systems used in automotive finance, logistics, oil operations, and federal infrastructure, including projects involving thousands of automated daily data processes, real-time reporting environments, and large-scale system migrations. His work reflects a part of digital transformation that rarely becomes visible outside enterprise IT teams, yet directly affects how reliably companies operate day to day.
In large companies, SAP BW systems (for storing, processing, and analyzing corporate data) process everything from financial reporting to logistics and risk calculations. When these systems fail, business operations can slow down within hours.
Baris Ozcan has spent the better part of his career working inside exactly these environments. At a leading European automotive financial services company in Braunschweig, where he has been working since 2014, he worked with systems processing thousands of daily data operations, where even a small reporting error could affect financial calculations or regulatory processes. In practice, this meant overseeing systems running around 2,000 automated process chains and 300 daily data loads connected to leasing operations, credit scoring, and regulatory reporting. If one of these processes failed, incorrect data could quickly spread across multiple departments. Ozcan’s job was to find where the chain had broken, restore the data flow, and keep reporting systems stable under constant operational load.
At Wieland Electric, Baris Ozcan was responsible for the company's SAP BW environment during a major transition from a legacy ERP system to SAP S/4HANA. The project went far from a technical migration. It required reassessing how data moved through the organisation, how reporting systems would function after the transition, and how analytics tools should evolve in the new environment. In addition to maintaining daily operations, Ozcan worked on monitoring, troubleshooting, data flow adjustments, reporting improvements, and DevOps-related tasks. He was also involved in evaluating the impact of the migration on existing reporting processes, estimating implementation efforts, and helping define the future architecture of the company’s analytics landscape.
“A migration to S/4HANA is not just about moving data from one platform to another,” Ozcan explained. “It is an opportunity to rethink how reporting, analytics, and business processes should work together in the future. The real challenge is ensuring that existing operations continue running while preparing the system for the next stage of development.”
This kind of work is rarely visible, yet it defines how resilient an organisation is under pressure. In environments where multiple departments rely on synchronised data pipelines, stability is not achieved once – it must be continuously maintained. By overseeing process chains, managing incidents, and coordinating between development and business teams, Ozcan contributed to keeping a complex analytical ecosystem operational in real time. His experience in such high-load environments illustrates a broader reality of enterprise IT: the value of a data system is measured not only by its design, but by its ability to function consistently under constant operational stress.
Many companies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland still rely on older SAP business systems that were introduced years ago and are now difficult to modernise. As these companies rush to migrate to newer platforms, one of the biggest problems is the shortage of experienced specialists who have already worked on complex system transitions from start to finish.
One key area is the transition from outdated systems to real-time analytics, which is now becoming the standard in business. On the project for Messe Berlin, a company that organises large international exhibitions, forums, and conferences in Berlin, Ozcan worked with a system where event reporting and customer CRM-related figures were made much more structured through a new SAP BW analytics setup. His work included data modeling, data extraction, reporting logic, testing, and coordination with business users. This helped create a more reliable reporting basis for operational and management decisions. As a result, the company gained the ability to track key metrics (visitors, sales, service operations) in real time, whereas previously the data was only
“A similar transformation occurred in a project for KJO, an Aramco-related joint oil and gas operation in the Middle East, where I developed the concept of a reporting system by linking data from supply chains to the SAP analytical platform. This made it possible to switch from Excel reports to a centralized system and track KPIs in real time,” Baris commented.
This difficulty is not exceptional. Organisations that have deferred migration the longest face those barriers in their most concentrated form. And as the available pool of practitioners with hands-on experience across multiple platform generations continues to tighten, the premium on deep technical knowledge, as Baris Ozcan has.
Today, digital transformation is most often associated with AI, user services, and new products. However, behind these visible changes lies a less obvious but fundamental layer – data infrastructure, on which business sustainability directly depends.
Baris Ozcan’s career reflects precisely this “hidden” layer of transformation. Working on projects for the automotive industry, energy sector, logistics, and the public sector, he focuses on ensuring that data is structured, accurate, and suitable for decision-making. Such contributions rarely come to public attention, but within the professional community, they are recognised through peer review mechanisms. Throughout his career, Ozcan has regularly participated in code reviews, architectural reviews, and the evaluation of other specialists’ work, tasks typically entrusted only to experienced experts working with mission-critical systems. In 2026, this professional standing received further recognition on the international stage: Ozcan became a winner of the Cases & Faces award, where he was recognized as “Innovator of the Year” in the category “Digital Transformation”.
Another aspect of his professional influence is his involvement in knowledge sharing within the industry. At KJO, he has reviewed the BW system before preparing the architecture concept and checked the system release level, with evaluating how BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports could be built on top of the BW environment. After that, he created training and documentation materials to explain the reporting setup, data flow, and usage of the new SCM reports.
As companies continue to modernise their data and transition to new architectures, the role of such specialists becomes increasingly significant. Although their work remains “behind the scenes”, it is precisely this work that forms the foundation of the digital economy – ensuring the reliability, consistency, and practical value of data.
