The One Question Every SAP Buyer Should Ask Before Signing — But Almost Never Do

There is a moment in every SAP decision that nobody handles as honestly as they should. It starts right around the time the field begins to narrow, and proposals start coming in. At this point, most organizations feel ready to commit to signing with a partner.

I have always said that choosing an SAP partner is closer to a marriage than a purchase, which makes the entire RFP process a dating phase. By the time you reach this point, you genuinely know and trust the partner across the table. But what it cannot do, even when it all goes well, is surface every unknown buried inside the scope. Some of those only show up once the project is already underway, which means the scope itself deserves an honest look before you commit to it.

So before the ink dries, ask the question almost no one says out loud: on a scale of one to ten, how confident are we in this scope? Put it to your own team first, before you put it to any partner. Most never ask it, because a polished proposal makes the scope feel settled, and because saying a number below ten out loud means admitting the work ahead is not as charted as everyone had hoped.

A Number Worth Saying Out Loud

I have asked customers that question for years, and what comes back is exactly why you should ask it of yourself first. The number matters less than the honesty behind it; it sets the level for everything that follows. A six tells me we have real work to do together to bring that confidence up. An eight or a nine tells me to ask what about your business or your landscape earns that confidence, so we can pressure-test whether it holds. Either way, the conversation calibrates to where you actually are, rather than where the proposal pretends you are.

A scope you can honestly rate a ten before a single requirement is built is rare, and the gap between the number you wish you could give and the number you can defend is the whole game.

Where the White Space Hides

That honest number rarely reaches a ten for a reason most buyers overlook, because it hides inside the thing they trust most. SAP's solutions are best in class, and that is exactly where the trouble starts.

It is easy to be romanced by how capable the software is and assume something this good leaves little room for gaps. The gap is still there. I call it the white space — the distance between the standard solution out of the box and the secret sauce that makes your company run the way it does.

That white space is usually where a smooth project is won or lost, so the sooner you account for it, the sooner you have a plan you can trust. The question is how you find it before you have signed for it. Understanding where that gap comes from is what makes it possible to close it.

Surfacing the Gap

The way you surface that white space before you commit is a phase zero assessment, the small project before the project begins. At its best, it is a whiteboarding session: the key business stakeholders, the key IT stakeholders, and the partner in one room, ideally in person, putting every requirement up on the board and ranking the why behind each one. The exercise pulls hidden landmines into the open while there is still time to plan around them.

While working with clients at Argano, I found that the landmine tends to surface in almost the same place every time. In at least eight out of every ten phase zero sessions, somewhere in the discovery, someone in the room admits their data is nowhere near ready for what they are trying to build.

You draw a circle around that on the board and star it, because you have just found the thing most likely to derail the timeline. And it matters more every year. As more of these initiatives lean on Artificial Intelligence (AI), the output is only ever as good as the data feeding it.

Dragging all of that into the open before the project starts can feel like slowing down. In practice, it does the opposite. The landmines you surface now are the ones you will not be defusing live, mid-project, with the budget already spent and the timeline already set. Front-loading that work is what lets the project move faster once it is underway.

Before the Ink Dries

The scope question measures your own readiness. It also does something else for free: it measures the partner sitting across from you. When you say your honest number out loud, watch what they do with it. The partner who hears a six and rolls up their sleeves to get you toward a nine is the one who will still be there with you at month twelve. The partner most willing to challenge what you believe going in is usually the one most willing to challenge it when the project gets hard.

Once you have a partner who will be honest with you, the natural instinct is to hand off the rest. But the contract itself deserves the same scrutiny. It is fair to ask whether you have sized the software correctly for your enterprise, whether you are buying for the state you are in today, and whether the scope holds for the next five years, maybe even ten.

The costliest outcome is to invest in the solution, invest in the implementation, go live, and discover you must go back, buy more, and implement again to cover what you had outgrown the day you signed.

None of this asks you to become an SAP expert. It asks for one honest conversation with your own team before you have it with anyone else. If you’re willing to ask this one question, what it reveals is not a problem. Instead, it is a head start. Every project meets speed bumps eventually, and the ones you surface now, while you still have room to plan, will not become emergencies later.

 

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