4.7 does include some enhanced functionality. These enhancements may include vast areas such as the recruitment front end, compensation, time management, financial management and organization management. The first decision is whether to utilise this functionality or not. If the decision is to not utilise it, then the upgrade is mostly technical in nature.

In addition to the new functionality, there are other reasons for electing to upgrade to Release 4.7:

• Optimization of SAP 4.6C to transform it into SAP Enterprise core: It involves the advancement in SAP 4.6C to make it more stable, improve its performance and enhance its Unicode compatibility. This optimized SAP 4.6C functions as the enterprise core of SAP 4.7.
• New additions in the form of SAP Enterprise Extensions: The functional enhancements that are to be made in SAP 4.6C are made in Enterprise extensions. These enterprise extensions are independent of the Enterprise Core as they are grouped on the basis of the area that it deals with such as Financials, SCM, HR, Travel Management and PLM. This feature of Extensions being independent of enterprise core makes it possible for the users to independently upgrade the functionalities of SAP4.6C. These extensions are linked to the enterprise core functionality by the means of BADIs (Business Add-Ins) or BTEs (Business Transaction Events), so that the SAP R/3 enterprise objects are not modified directly.
• Integrating with SAP Web Application Server (WAS): SAP WAS is the advanced form of SAP Basis technology that has been achieved by adding a few system administration processes, especially with regard to Web enabling. Hence, in it all the administration system activities are carried on as before without need for many changes.

The upgrade of SAP 4.6C devises a new upgrade procedure known as System Switch Upgrade, which is the standard procedure for all software components that run on SAP WAS 6.10 and higher. This upgrade procedure gives its customers the option of selecting between two different upgrade strategies, depending on whether they want to keep their downtime or system resources to a minimum. The feature of the system that makes this procedure so popular is the non-active shadow system (the additional instance of the system) that already runs with the target release software version. This allows the upgrading of the objects without shutting down by processing the objects in the non-active shadow system while the production system is still running. The generated shadow repository is activated later on and replaces the old repository.

The time that is required for upgrading to SAP 4.7 is much less i.e. 30% to 50% faster as compared to what was required in upgrading previous versions. Also, the version is more user-friendly and stable. The feature of SAP Enterprise being available for 64-bit operating system might require the upgrade their operating system platforms. The performance and resource requirements for SAP enterprise are plus or minus 10% less that of SAP 4.6C.