The cost of managing SAP change can hit you hard in the back pocket.
It’s a persistent theme that runs throughout Vinnie Mirchandani’s SAP Nation series.
I’ve almost completed the third version — it’s titled SAP Nation – Manifest Destiny.
I highly recommend all three of Vinnie’s SAP Nation books for their great insight from a customer perspective into the highly complex, ever-change world of SAP software.
What is incredible — almost unbelievable — and it’s in all three of Vinnie’s books is the money customers spend every year to get SAP running and keep it running.
Of course, SAP software is integral to running some of the world’s largest and sophisticated businesses and governments.
So, SAP delivers highly complex solutions to solve very complicated problems. And that will be expensive.
But Vinnie’s well-documented estimates of SAP customers spending $200B plus per year on SAP-related efforts is enormous.
Where does the money go?
So the million dollar question for organizations when it comes to managing SAP change is: “How much does it cost to manage our SAP technical changes?”
Interestingly, for many SAP customers, it typically costs approximately a million dollars per year to manage SAP changes.
Hard data from our customers and prospects indicates the cost to manage SAP change is usually $150-$300 per change.
It’s important to recognize these costs are not the development, configuration and testing costs.
But are the overhead costs of managing SAP changes from the initial approvals and tracking, through the testing, to the migration to production.
Cost such as the following can add up to significant amounts for SAP customers:
- SAP change/transport management coordinators
- Change approval board meetings
- Retrofitting or rekeying of changes in N+1 development systems
- Parallel development tracking
- Audit preparation and execution
- Approvals and approval tracking
- Migrations of the changes (transports) to target systems/clients
- Project cutovers
- Downtime/recovery of production and non-production systems
- Re-work/fixing development and configuration issues in quality and production systems
How to calculate your costs of managing SAP change
To get a rough estimate of your costs, simply multiply your number of annual SAP changes (for example transports) by $225 – the midpoint of our average range.
For a better estimate, check out the SAP Cost of Change Calculator on our website.
All you have to do to get a more accurate estimate is enter three inputs.
Once you have an understanding of your costs, getting management buy-in to examine cost reduction alternatives through SAP change management automation is typically easier.
Want to dig a little deeper how much managing SAP change costs you?
We recently hosted a webinar: “How much does SAP change management cost your business?”, which is available on-demand here.
And, our SAP change management experts have developed a workbook which identifies the key input metrics and calculates your costs across the categories listed above.
If you would like to request a copy of the workbook or discuss ways to reduce your costs while significantly improving your SAP change management outcomes, please contact us.
