For 30 years, a major research publisher ran its entire revenue operation on AS/400. Pricing rules, subscription logic, institutional licensing, fulfillment workflows — all encoded in bespoke programs that only a handful of people still understood.
The impossible migration
The path to S/4HANA required replacing the AS/400. But the AS/400 held revenue logic that SAP couldn’t replicate out of the box — institutional pricing tiers, multi-year subscription modeling, complex bundling rules that had evolved over decades to match how academic institutions actually purchase.
Rewriting this logic in ABAP or custom S/4HANA code was estimated at 18+ months and $4M+. And it would create the same problem in a new system — brittle, hard-to-change custom code.
The viax approach
Instead of rewriting logic inside S/4HANA, the team modeled it in viax. Subscription interactions, institutional pricing determinations, and bundling configurations were captured as execution models — preserving the business intent of 30 years of logic without carrying forward the technical debt.
“We didn’t lose 30 years of revenue knowledge. We translated it into a form that can actually evolve.”
The result
The AS/400 was decommissioned on schedule. S/4HANA runs clean — no custom revenue code, no ABAP extensions. All revenue execution happens in viax, where it can change at business speed. The publisher has since launched two new digital subscription models that would have taken a year in the old system. On viax, they took weeks.