Yes — and this is often the highest-ROI advisory engagement available. Most organisations on SAP are using 40–60% of the functionality they are paying for. Unused capabilities typically include: SAP Business AI features embedded in S/4HANA that have never been activated (bank reconciliation AI, demand forecasting, Situation Handling); standard Fiori apps that replace manual processes still being run on spreadsheets; integration capabilities that could eliminate re-keying between SAP and adjacent systems; and reporting and analytics tools included in the SAP licence that users don't know exist. A 3–4 week SAP investment optimisation engagement identifies the quick wins from existing functionality — value that requires configuration and adoption effort, not new licence investment.

The conflict is real and worth acknowledging directly: an advisory firm that also sells implementations has a commercial incentive to recommend implementations. We manage this through three practices. First, advisory deliverables document the rationale for the recommendation — including why the alternatives were rejected — which means the recommendation can be independently scrutinised. Second, we have recommended against SAP in ERP selections where the client's requirements were genuinely better served by a different product. Third, the advisory team is evaluated on recommendation quality and client satisfaction, not on whether the advisory engagement generates an implementation contract. Our 88% repeat client rate is built on trust that we give the advice we would give if we were not pitching for the follow-on work — because that is the only advisory model that produces repeat engagements over 21 years.

An ERP selection engagement typically runs 8–12 weeks and covers: requirements definition (structured interviews across Finance, Operations, Supply Chain, HR and IT); requirements prioritisation and weighting; vendor shortlist creation based on functional coverage, deployment model and India localisation capability; RFP / RFI design and vendor response evaluation; structured demonstration sessions with scored scripted scenarios rather than free-form demos; TCO comparison across the shortlist; reference client conversations; and a documented recommendation with the scoring rationale. The output is a board-presentable recommendation document — not just a shortlist. For organisations choosing between SAP products (B1 vs GROW vs RISE vs on-premise), the engagement is shorter (4–6 weeks) because the functional coverage differences are more focused than a full market evaluation.

The 2027 deadline creates urgency but should not create panic-driven decisions. The right advisory sequence is: first, assess the current ECC landscape (custom code volume, data volumes, integration complexity) to understand the migration effort; second, decide on migration approach (brownfield system conversion, greenfield reimplementation or selective data transition) based on the assessment; third, determine the target deployment model (on-premise S/4HANA, GROW or RISE); fourth, plan pre-migration activities (archiving, data cleansing, interface rationalisation) that should begin 6–12 months before the migration project starts; and fifth, size the implementation project and set a realistic go-live date that allows a buffer before December 2027. A migration project for a complex ECC landscape takes 12–18 months. Working back from December 2027, the migration project should ideally start no later than mid-2025 for a comfortable buffer — meaning the advisory assessment should happen now, not in 2026.

Yes — and this is one of the most common advisory engagement triggers. IT leadership often knows what the right technology decision is but needs a credible, independently validated business case to present to a board or finance committee that is sceptical of technology investment claims. We build business cases from the organisation's own operational data: actual FTE time spent on manual processes (multiplied by blended cost to quantify the saving), actual error rates and the cost to correct them, actual inventory levels against industry benchmarks (quantifying the working capital opportunity), and actual system downtime and its revenue impact. These are defensible figures — not industry averages applied without evidence. The business case document is designed to survive a CFO challenge, because CFOs apply the same scrutiny to IT investment proposals that they apply to capital expenditure requests, and the standard "digital transformation" narrative does not survive that scrutiny.