Both companies were established fashion brands running SAP AFS, both with wholesale and direct-to-consumer channels, both moving to S/4HANA Fashion and Retail within the same eighteen-month window. On paper they were the same project. The approaches ended up almost opposite, for reasons worth setting out.
The first brand had a heavily customised AFS landscape but a business process model its leadership considered a competitive asset. Allocation logic in particular had been refined over years and was genuinely differentiated. A greenfield redesign would have meant rebuilding that logic in a new structure with no guarantee of parity, so the migration ran as a brownfield conversion with CeleRITE handling configuration extraction and custom code remediation.
The second brand had comparatively light customisation but a process estate that had grown around limitations in the old system rather than around commercial intent. Several of its most complex workflows existed to compensate for AFS constraints that S/4HANA Fashion simply does not have. Carrying that forward would have preserved workarounds for problems that no longer existed, so the work ran as a Fit to Standard greenfield.
The article master was the pivotal object in both cases and in both it consumed more effort than the plan assumed. Variant structures, colour and size grids, and season assignment carry business meaning that no automated mapping infers correctly without validation from merchandising.
The transferable lesson is that the approach decision should follow from whether the current process model is an asset or an accumulation. That question is answerable in an assessment, and answering it wrong is the most expensive mistake available in a fashion migration.