A client in Stuttgart paused their S/4HANA finance rollout last quarter, six weeks before go-live. The system was ready. Testing had passed. The issue was that nobody had resolved how to handle intercompany pricing across three legal entities, and the CFO refused to sign off until the logic was locked. That decision had been flagged in month two. It reached month fourteen still open.
This pattern repeats across our SAP network. The technical workstream moves forward, the integrator hits their milestones, and somewhere in a SharePoint folder sits a list of business questions that keep getting bumped to the next steering meeting. Each deferral feels small. The cumulative effect is a program that cannot close because the organisation has not actually committed to how it wants to operate.
The pressure is getting worse as AI-assisted implementation tools compress timelines. Configuration that once took months now takes weeks. The business decisions underneath, how do we allocate costs, who owns which data, what exceptions do we permit, still require senior stakeholders to sit in a room and commit. When the technical runway shrinks and the decision backlog stays the same size, the collision happens closer to go-live, when the cost of delay multiplies.
We see the hiring consequence in the roles clients now request. The S/4HANA program managers getting shortlisted are those who have a track record of surfacing business decisions early and forcing resolution before the technical work outruns them. One search we ran in Frankfurt last month specified exactly this: a program lead who could walk into a room of senior finance leaders and force a commitment before the next sprint closed. The client had been burned before by a go-live that slipped four months because nobody owned the decision backlog.
Prompted by reporting from ERP Today.