The technical challenge Daikin faced will sound familiar to anyone who has worked inside a multinational manufacturer: dozens of disconnected systems, manual handoffs between plants, inventory numbers that never quite matched across regions. The decision to consolidate onto S/4HANA was the obvious fix. The harder question was who would actually make it work.
What caught our attention in this case was the framing. Daikin anchored the entire programme around employees and end customers, which sounds like corporate boilerplate until you see what it meant in practice. The rollout prioritised user adoption metrics alongside technical milestones. Training budgets matched implementation budgets. The project team included operations staff from day one, brought in while configuration decisions were still being made.
ERP migrations stall in predictable ways. A company commits to S/4HANA, assembles a technical team, hits go-live on schedule, then watches adoption crater because the people running daily operations were never brought in properly. Daikin’s approach inverts that. The autonomy they are building into their processes only works if floor-level staff trust the data and use the tools as designed.
For hiring managers in manufacturing, the implication is concrete. Roles that sit between the technical implementation and the operational user base are becoming harder to fill. We placed a senior SAP consultant into a similar programme earlier this year specifically because she had run change management workshops alongside her configuration work. That combination is now the core requirement in most searches we take for manufacturing clients.
A Munich-based industrial company we work with recently rewrote its SAP programme manager specification to require workshop facilitation experience. The technical skills were assumed. The ability to bring operations teams along was the filter.
Prompted by reporting from SAP News Centre.