This partner insight was authored by Russ Pitzner, Vice President of Sales – Northeast, at RED Global.

Roughly 80% of a well-run SAP program proceeds along expected lines, which is what a systems integrator’s contract is structured to deliver. The remaining 20% is where most transformations are won or lost. It is also the part that customers, through no fault of their own, are least prepared to address.

I’ve observed this pattern across 25 years of experience with SAP customers. A customer may undertake a transformation of this size only a few times over the course of a career, while firms like RED Global and our SI partners are continuously immersed in this work. The result is a knowledge gap in the parts of an initiative that are organization-specific, difficult to anticipate, and only fully visible once it’s underway.

SIs are excellent at what they are built to deliver. A $3 billion manufacturing company can engage an SI to size the supply chain, finance, and order-to-cash functions against templates the SI has deployed many times before. They bring methodology, bench depth, and a proven ability to execute against a fixed statement of work.

Other parts of the initiative resist that kind of templating. Data quality requirements that have not been stress-tested. Localization gaps that the global blueprint did not surface. Organizational change. End-user training. Knowledge transfer back to the internal team. The process specifics that are unique to each company. These areas defy up-front estimation, evade clean deliverable definitions, and are inherently specific to each customer. The SI takes on what can be defensibly contracted, and the remainder is left to the customer to coordinate.

The SI is focused on executing the contract. The customer is focused on standing up a system that will run the business for the next decade or longer. Those priorities can run in parallel, but they do not fully align. Recognizing that distinction early is what allows a CIO to assemble the right partner ecosystem around the program from the outset.

What the 20% Looks Like in Practice

The shortfalls SIs leave behind follow a recognizable shape. In some cases, the issue surfaces in an unexpected process gap: an upstream user selects a default code because the system permits the selection, creating downstream issues that another team must manually correct. In other cases, it appears as customer scenarios that occur infrequently but require special handling, the kind of edge case that does not surface in an initial blueprint.

User adoption is the most demanding area. Strong end users will make a mediocre system perform well, while frustrated users will undermine even a well-designed system. Adoption readiness varies meaningfully by organization in ways that do not map cleanly to a statement of work. As a result, this work is typically delegated to the customer, who is rarely positioned to lead a serious organizational change effort across a global workforce.

RED Global’s engagement with Teva is a useful illustration. Teva’s primary SI initially attempted to handle organizational change and end-user training as part of an ECC 6 rollout. When that scope proved difficult to execute well within a traditional SI contract, Teva brought in RED Global to build an OCM strategy and implement a dedicated end-user training function. Over time, we expanded well beyond that initial scope. Our team became an extension of Teva’s internal organization, supporting broader business and IT work streams as the program grew.

Across the eight years that followed, RED Global deployed SAP across Europe, Latin America, Central America, and Asia. We trained more than 10,000 end users in multiple languages and remained engaged through the regional rollouts that followed each go-live. The effort succeeded because the work was treated as a discipline in its own right, and because the team was structured to grow with the customer’s evolving needs.

Sandoz shows how the same operating model adapts to a different need. Following Sandoz’s separation from Novartis, the company aimed to implement a new SAP environment quickly and did not have time to build a full internal team first. Sandoz needed experienced business and IT consultants who understood the generics manufacturing model and could function as part of the team from day one.

We onboarded approximately 85 contract-to-hire resources across Europe and India over a three-month period, drawing in significant part from a network of consultants whose track records in the same industry and process shape we already knew. The program is ongoing today.

What allows RED Global to show up differently for projects like these is how we approach staffing. A large SI’s resource manager is incentivized to deploy the consultants currently between engagements. If a pharmaceutical rollout requires order-to-cash specialists and twenty are available on the bench, those twenty will typically be proposed regardless of whether their experience is in pharma.

We assemble the team the engagement actually requires, drawing from the largest SAP professional network in the world. The value of that network is not its scale but the access it provides to consultants who have worked through the specific challenges a customer is about to face, in their industry, region, and language.

Continuity Across the SAP Lifecycle

Most customers cycle through multiple SIs over the course of their SAP journey. A different firm often handles the original ECC initiative than the S/4HANA migration, with another responsible for the regional rollouts that follow. Each new SI arrives with its own methodology and playbook, executes against the statement of work, and rolls off when the contract closes.

Much of the reasoning behind what was built leaves with them. The rationale for a particular design decision, the question of whether a given localization was deliberate or a workaround, the unusual edges of the data model—this context resides with the people who delivered the engagement, who, by the time the next phase begins, are working elsewhere.

When the next phase begins, the customer benefits from having a partner already embedded who carries that institutional history. We call this the second integrator. The SI delivers against the contract. RED Global’s role is to support the customer through the changes the program goes through over time, providing continuity that the SI rotation does not.

McCormick engaged us at the start of their ECC-to-S/4HANA journey as a sole-sourced partner to supplement their internal team and to reduce the risks associated with relying on a single integrator. Approximately 50 of our consultants collaborated alongside the primary SI across North America, Asia, and Europe, providing the capacity required outside the SI’s remit.

The original deployment plan was three years, but it ultimately ran longer: a year-long pause during COVID interrupted the timeline, and a subsequent change in primary SI prompted a substantial rework of the deployment strategy. Disruptions of that scale are not unusual on programs of this size, and absorbing them without losing institutional knowledge is part of what a second integrator makes possible.

Market dynamics are making that continuity more valuable now than it was even a few years ago. SAP is not producing new consultants at the rate the current demand curve requires. We are observing an inflection point in the number of initiatives kicking off, and when demand outpaces a relatively stagnant resource pool, consulting rates rise.

Turnover in India has become one of the higher hidden costs in SAP transformations. Consultants on the ground there are commonly juggling three, four, or five client engagements simultaneously, which is a substantial factor in why the industry pushed for return-to-office in India. When deadlines slip, deliverables are missed, or a consultant departs mid-project, the ramp-up period for a replacement typically runs two to three months.

RED Global’s approach is to pay above market, which keeps our consultants focused on one project at a time, holds turnover substantially under the industry norm at sub-5%, and reduces risk for the customer.

When the SI hands over the keys, what determines the long-term success of the transformation is not whether the system is operational on day one, but whether the people running the business understand the rationale for how it was built, whether they can adapt it through the next wave of change, and whether the institutional knowledge remains accessible when it is needed.

An ERP transformation is one of the largest commitments an enterprise will make in a decade. The value a customer realizes from that investment depends on how well the 20% gets done—and that is the work we are equipped to do.

Russ Pitzner is Vice President of Sales – Northeast, at RED Global.