Ron's Reflections

Implement and Forget Is Not a Good Strategy

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Ron Gilson

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Go-Live Is the Starting Line

There is no shortage of opinions on the best way to move from legacy SAP to SAP Cloud ERP. Greenfield, brownfield, selective data transition, Public or Private. Every vendor, analyst and peer group has a view.

I am not going to wade into that debate here. The honest answer is “it depends,” and that is a conversation for another day.

What I want to talk about is what happens after the path is chosen and the project is done. Because regardless of the approach, I see the same pattern far too often: go-live and stabilization become the destination. The program team celebrates, the system integrator rolls off, and the organization exhales. Then the ERP quietly settles into maintenance mode.

Implement and forget is not a strategy. It is the fastest way to turn a promising investment and business case into a boat anchor of unrealized value.

How Go-Live Becomes the Destination

In my experience, organizations land on “implement and forget” one of two ways.

Intentionally. Sometimes the “get SAP live” objective is the desired end state. Support deadlines, regulatory requirements or a carve-out force a move, and the mandate is simply to get there safely and stay compliant. That is a legitimate reason to start. It is a poor reason to stop.

Unintentionally. More often, nobody decides to stop. The program runs long, the budget gets tight, the business has been patient for months (or years), and inflated or unrealistic expectations have not been met. Once the system is stable (or worst case, before stabilization), the organization loses interest and attention shifts to the next priority: an acquisition, a new plant, a product launch. The project team disbands without a sustainable COE strategy and the ERP roadmap quietly falls off the strategic agenda (if there ever was a business validated and supported roadmap).

The data backs this up. Prosci reports that many organizations treat go-live as the destination, putting 92% of their budget into technical activities leading up to deployment. The same research found that organizations treating go-live as the finish line misunderstand when ERP value materializes.

None of this is new … for a bit of a “back to the future” moment, read this Deloitte “ERP’s Second Wave” report from 1998.

The Real Cost of Standing Still

In the on-premise world, “implement and forget” was expensive but survivable. You could run the same release for a decade or longer. SAP itself notes that many organizations keep the release they initially installed for up to ten years, bolting on custom code to meet new business requests along the way.

That model does not work in SAP Cloud ERP. The innovation keeps coming whether you are ready or not.

The costs compound quietly. Workarounds harden into habits. Custom code creeps back into a core you worked hard to clean. Security corrections are only guaranteed for feature and support packages from the last two years. And when the business finally asks for AI, embedded analytics or a faster close, the foundation is not ready.

The irony is that staying current gets easier with practice. SAP’s own data shows customers who upgrade regularly average four-month upgrade projects versus six months for those who wait. Like any muscle, it weakens when you stop using it.

What a Continuous Innovation Mindset Looks Like

Continuous innovation is not a tool or a service contract. It is a set of leadership habits. Having sat in the CIO chair for more than two decades, here are the ones I have seen make the difference.

Executives Own the Agenda

Continuous innovation cannot be delegated to IT or left to a support team. It succeeds when the executive team takes an active role, and it fades when they do not. That role has four parts.

  • Shape. Executives set the direction. They tie the innovation agenda to business strategy: margin, growth, customer service, compliance. Without that link, the roadmap becomes a list of technical upgrades nobody outside IT cares about.
  • Prioritize. There will always be more ideas than capacity. Leaders make the hard calls on what matters most this quarter and what waits, and they hold that line when the next urgent request arrives.
  • Fund. Continuous innovation needs a continuous budget. Treat it as an ongoing operating commitment, not a series of one-off capital requests that compete with every other project.
  • Govern. Value needs regular executive attention. Prosci recommends a recurring, often monthly, business case review where sponsors revisit value assumptions, flag benefits at risk and course correct.

Lines of business carry the other half of the load. Business process owners, not the project team, should own the outcomes in their area and be accountable for them. Set baselines early and measure against them. Prosci found organizations with mature metrics reach a 28% success rate, four times those with poor metrics. When the business owns the value, IT becomes a partner in delivering it rather than the department chasing adoption.

Continuous Innovation Requires Continuous Learning

You cannot adopt what you do not know exists. Every release and feature pack brings new capability, and someone has to understand it well enough to see where it fits. Each S/4HANA release introduces new Fiori Apps, New AI agents and assistants, and new functionality. That is a lot of potential value to leave undiscovered.

This is where many organizations underinvest. Training budgets get spent before go-live and never come back. The project experts roll off. Within a year or two, the people running the system know less about its capabilities than the day it went live.

Breaking that pattern takes deliberate investment in both IT and business resources:

  • Build learning into the release rhythm. For every release or feature pack, review what is new, translate it into business terms and decide what is worth adopting. SAP’s What’s New Viewer and Enterprise Support Academy, with more than 1,400 learning assets, are a good starting point.
  • Develop the business, not just IT. Key users and process owners are the ones who spot opportunities in their daily work. Give them the time and access to stay current.
  • Protect time, not just budget. Learning that only happens “when things slow down” never happens. Put it on the calendar.
  • Share what you learn. Internal showcases, lunch-and-learns and peer user groups turn individual knowledge into organizational capability.

Continuous improvement runs on continuous learning. Stop investing in your people, and the innovation pipeline dries up no matter how good the software is.

The Operating Habits

Leadership and learning set the conditions. These habits keep the engine running.

  1. Fund the run, not just the build. Plan and protect a post-go-live budget before the program starts. If every dollar is spent getting to go-live, there will be nothing left to capture the value.
  2. Put innovation on the calendar. Build an annual roadmap around SAP’s release rhythm. SAP recommends separating technical upgrades from functional innovation so neither slows the other down.
  3. Keep the core clean after go-live. Clean core is not a project milestone. SAP’s own methodology calls for a continuous “keep clean” governance process in the Run phase. Extend on BTP, challenge every modification, and treat standard as the default.
  4. Keep a standing team. A small center of excellence that blends business process owners and IT keeps knowledge in-house and momentum alive. Without it, every enhancement becomes a new project.
  5. Stay connected. Peer communities, user groups and your partner ecosystem are where you learn what others are adopting and what is actually working. Nobody should be innovating alone.

None of these require a massive budget. They require intent and discipline, and a shift from thinking of ERP as a project to thinking of it as a capability.

Small Wins, Real Problems and a Seat at the Table

A mindset is only as good as how it shows up day to day. Three principles separate the organizations that keep delivering value from those that stall.

Think Snowball, Not Avalanche

Too often, organizations fix their attention on the big transformations: the large projects with big numbers attached. Those programs have their place, but they can take years to prioritize, fund, staff and deliver.

A pragmatic approach is to focus on small, incremental improvements. Fix one approval bottleneck. Automate one manual reconciliation. Clean up one master data domain. Each win is modest on its own, but like a snowball rolling downhill, it picks up mass and momentum. Success breeds success. Small wins build credibility, free up capacity and make the case for the next investment far easier than any business case slide.

Transformation vs Continuous Innovation is not an “OR” conversation. Successful organizations find a way to make it an “AND” conversation – transformation AND continuous innovation/improvement to drive sustainable long term value creation.

Start With the Problem, Not the Technology

Value delivery has to start with a business problem to solve. Not a technology looking for a problem, but a problem in search of a solution.

This matters more than ever with AI. AI is a powerful technology, and sometimes it is exactly the right answer. Just as often, something far less complex delivers more value:

  • Redesigning a broken process
  • Automating a manual workflow
  • Cleansing and governing the data
  • Turning on standard functionality that is already licensed

The best solution is the simplest one that solves the problem. If you start with the technology, you will find yourself forcing a fit. If you start with the problem, the right answer usually reveals itself.

Earn the Seat at the Table

In many organizations, IT is on the outside looking in. It sits in a reactive position, brought in late in the process or after a decision has already been made. By then, the best IT can do is implement someone else’s answer.

The best IT organizations break that pattern. They prove their value through reliable delivery and business fluency, and in doing so they earn a seat at the table. They are included in early conversations about the opportunities and problems worth solving and the potential ways to solve them.

That seat is not granted by title or org chart. It is earned one delivered outcome at a time, which brings us right back to the snowball.

The Question to Ask Now

Whether you are planning your move, in the middle of it, or already live, ask your leadership team one simple question: what happens the day after hypercare ends?

If the answer is “we go back to normal,” you have a plan for a system, not a plan for value. For mid-market companies, where every dollar and every person counts, that gap matters even more.

The path you choose to SAP Cloud ERP will always depend on your situation. The need for a continuous innovation mindset does not. Go-live is not the finish line. It is the starting line.

Sources

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