Key takeaways
- —Almost everything that goes wrong on a program traces back to one of three things: stalled work, slow decisions, or someone finding out too late
- —Complexity, fragmentation, and time pressure make SAP programs harder to run than almost any other kind of project
- —Speed only gets dangerous when it means skipping steps. It gets safe when it means catching problems sooner
- —Ten specific moves map to the SAP lifecycle, from Prepare and Explore through Deploy and Run
SAP transformations are being asked to do something they've historically struggled to do: move faster while keeping the complexity of the work under control.
Justin, Tato's CEO, and PG, Tato's Head of Product, have heard versions of this from CIOs and SI leaders all year, often from people who have never met each other. One story keeps coming up with a number attached: a managing partner at a major ERP consulting firm who used to sell 1,000 hours for a project like this. His firm sells 200 now, for the same scope of work.
That's a 5× shift in the amount of work being sold—and a pretty good reason to ask what's changing in the way SAP transformations get delivered.
Where SAP projects lose time
Ask 50 people why an SAP program went sideways and you'll get 50 different answers: scope, testing, a bad hire, a client who kept changing direction. Underneath most of them, it's one of three things. The work stalled. A decision took too long to make. Or someone who needed to know something didn't find out in time to act.
Three forces make this worse on an SAP program specifically. Too many stakeholders, each looking at the same problem through a different lens (complexity). Project knowledge scattered across a dozen tools and a handful of people's memory (fragmentation). A clock that never stops running while the ground keeps shifting underneath the plan (time pressure). Stack all three on the same program and the team ends up spending more energy watching each other than watching the actual risk.
That's the diagnosis—and it's only one section of this paper. Download 10 Ways AI Is Accelerating SAP Implementation here.
What does acceleration actually look like?
Drawing on decades of hands-on experience, we know where transformation projects tend to get stuck.
So we mapped those friction points to 10 practical ways AI can help teams move through them faster.
Each move is tied to a specific phase of the SAP implementation (Prepare & Explore, Realize, Deploy, or Run) and a specific challenge teams face along the way.
Some speed up decisions. Others shorten the time between a risk emerging and someone acting on it, reduce the manual work slowing teams down, or keep ownership moving without unnecessary handoffs.
Is faster automatically riskier?
It can be, if the extra speed comes from skipping steps instead of catching problems sooner. The paper gets into a different way to think about speed. Speed is safe when it shortens the time between a mistake happening and someone noticing. It's dangerous when it just means moving fast with no one actually watching.
The 10 moves in the paper are about making SAP implementation faster where it matters. That's the playbook. Download the full paper here.
Frequently asked questions
What is "10 Ways AI Is Accelerating SAP Implementation" about?
A paper mapping 10 specific, practical moves to the SAP implementation lifecycle (Prepare and Explore through Deploy and Run) each aimed at speeding up decisions or catching risk earlier.
Why do ERP implementations still spiral out of control?
Complexity, fragmentation, and time pressure stack on the same program at once, breaking either the work, the decisions, or the visibility into what's happening.
Can AI make ERP delivery faster without making it riskier?
Yes, as long as the extra speed goes into catching problems sooner rather than skipping the steps that would have caught them at all.
Where in the SAP lifecycle do these moves apply?
All four phases covered in the paper: Prepare and Explore, Realize, Deploy, and Run.
