The move to SAP S/4HANA will cost Fujitsu three quarters of a billion dollars to standardize more than 4,000 ERP systems.

Fujitsu is halfway through the ambitious process of standardizing all ERP applications. In five years, by the end of 2025, the more than 4,000 different systems will have to be streamlined and operated on SAP S/4HANA in Microsoft Azure. The project will employ 1,500 people at its peak and cost around US$760 million.

Fujitsu currently employs around 124,200 people. A large part of the ERP applications in the company runs on SAP today, but there are also some systems that were developed in-house.

Fujitsu strives to organize and integrate everything at once to streamline its operations in a holistic way. In addition to the S4/HANA platform, a number of SaaS front-end applications run on Azure with some elements on AWS.

The organization has to process data from sales, accounting, procurement and many other moving parts. The risk of many large ERP projects is that it takes years to fully understand all business processes. Until everything is implemented in new systems, the process often takes too long because the business has changed.

Of course, Fujitsu wants to present itself as a successful example of digital transformation. According to The Register, the company is striving for the holy grail of front-end and back-end in a coordinated system.

SAP Concur and other services have been operational since fiscal year 2022. An ERP system aimed at employees must be operational in fiscal year 2024. Gartner previously analyzed that SAP customers are reluctant to migrate to S/4HANA. Fujitsu is taking the plunge and is waiting to see if its customers do the same.