VIM must be upgraded in parallel with the S/4HANA migration rather than afterward, and the first step is a version compatibility check, because VIM releases are aligned with specific S/4HANA releases. An S/4HANA version that predates the current VIM releases will not run them, and each recent VIM release pairs with a specific S/4HANA release, so the target S/4HANA version determines the target VIM version. ECC-era releases such as VIM 7.5 and 7.6 must move to an S/4HANA-compatible release, and compatibility must be verified across the related components as well, including the capture platform, where older products such as Invoice Capture Center and Business Capture Center are superseded by the current Capture for SAP generation, and the archive repository.
The upgrade itself follows a defined sequence: a technical blueprint of the current VIM components and usage, installation and configuration of the new versions once the S/4HANA foundation components are in place, activation of the new configuration sets, adjustment of PO and non-PO document-type configurations to match the current implementation, retraining capture on current invoices, end-to-end testing, cutover, and hypercare. Workflow configurations generally carry over, and end users see little day-to-day difference, but organizations on older versions face longer upgrade paths. The larger opportunity is cleaning house first: PetSmart's reimplementation reduced custom objects from 235 to 27 specifically to prepare the environment for S/4HANA. Addressing VIM before or during the migration is cheaper than dragging old custom code across and fixing it there.