- IAG, an insurer, took a pause to rethink its move from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, mapping finance processes and tidying data first, according to executive manager Prashant Shetty.
- Shetty says IAG mapped over 300 processes and cleared 40 percent of its company codes, which he says reduced the data to migrate and brought benefits such as a faster close.
- Leaders planning ERP moves can ask whether the work doubles as groundwork for AI, and whether anyone has mapped the processes being moved.
A forced upgrade became a chance to ask better questions
Most ERP migrations start with a deadline. The old system loses support, so the business moves. IAG's move off SAP ECC to S/4HANA began that way, according to iTnews' report of a talk by IAG's executive manager of digital finance, Prashant Shetty.
At the SAP NOW AI Tour in Sydney, Shetty described a programme that began because ECC support was ending. A second driver was meeting IFRS 17, the accounting standard for insurers. He said the migration has run "for a few years" and is still ongoing.
Partway through, the thinking changed. Shetty said the rise of AI made the team ask whether to build a system for today or for the future. He described this as a chance to take a pause and rethink what a finance-centred ERP should look like. The migration itself continued. The team chose to "fix our process" and "fix our data".
The lesson here is that a mandatory upgrade is a good moment to ask what the system should be doing. The deadline already justifies the project. The harder work is using it to ask better questions.
Two terms worth knowing
This section is background, not Shetty's claim. Signavio is an SAP tool that discovers and models business processes. It shows how work flows from step to step and where it gets stuck.
A company code is a unit in SAP finance, usually a legal entity such as a subsidiary. Each one carries its own ledgers and its own period-end work. In general, fewer company codes means less finance data to carry into the new system and fewer sets of books to close each period.
What IAG says it did
IAG used Signavio to capture and map "300-plus" finance processes. Shetty called the result "a very critical data point" for guiding the migration. In the report's words, it meant the company was not just theorising about how certain processes would work on S/4HANA.
The mapping also paid off outside the upgrade. Shetty said teams can now see how a process runs from end to end, where bottlenecks sit and how data moves through the system. That helps them pick a few large improvements and target them.
The second step was data. Shetty says 40 percent of IAG's company codes are gone. By his account, that significantly reduced the data migration work.
He also described benefits in day-to-day finance. In his words, these came "in terms of faster close, or just reducing the risk" of holding so many company codes. The "or" matters. He did not give a measured close time.
Why this matters for AI
Shetty also leads AI enablement in finance. He said the process and data work has prepared IAG well for AI use cases. His summary: "AI cannot drive value in itself." The business needs the right data and the right process first.
This gives a practical meaning to the phrase "AI readiness". In IAG's account, it is less about buying a model. It is a finance function that knows what its processes are and holds only the data it needs.
The risk runs the other way too. An AI tool pointed at hundreds of undocumented processes and an overgrown set of company codes would work from the same mess people already struggle with. This is the publication's view, not a claim Shetty made.
IAG's method for finding AI uses is also plain. Shetty described a network of internal "activators", or AI enthusiasts and champions, with him as the "lead activator". Finance colleagues bring pain points such as manual reconciliation and data problems. The team then breaks each one down to find a fit.
Limits of the account
This is one company's description of its own project, given at a vendor event. The report gives no cost figures, no completion date and no measure of how much faster the close is. The migration is still under way, so the final outcome is unknown.
IAG's choices may not suit every organisation. But the sequence is worth testing against your own plans.
What to ask your team
Ask whether your ERP migration is scoped as a lift-and-shift or as a chance to remove what you no longer need. Ask how many of your finance processes are documented end to end, and by what method.
Ask how much of the data in scope has an owner and a current use. Shetty's 40 percent figure is IAG's own, not a benchmark. The useful part is that the team counted.
Ask whether AI proposals in finance name the process and data they depend on. If they do not, the groundwork may not be finished.
A deadline forces the move. IAG says the cleanup is what let it move faster, and that is a claim worth testing in your own programme.
Produced by the WebPulse Newsroom with AI assistance from the original reporting credited below, and checked against that source by our editorial review. How we use AI.
Original reporting: iTnews.
