The Adoption Illusion: What Nobody Tells You About Enterprise Technology After the Go-Live
Fourteen months after go-live, the head of operations at a power utility in the South slid a printed report across the table.
“Why does it still take my team three days to reconcile transformer maintenance records? We spent two years on this.”
SAP BTP integrations were live. SAC Dashboards were green. IT had declared success. I didn’t have a good answer.
What I found
I stopped meeting with IT & sat with his actual Business teams that works with Field engineers, finance, outage planners. Where the work happens.
- Field engineers still logged maintenance in a legacy mobile app they’d used for years
- Nobody had integrated that app with BTP
- In 18 months of implementation, nobody asked the engineers what tools they used
We fixed it with Integration Suite in six weeks. Three days became four hours.
The gap between deployment and value is real. It doesn’t close on its own, and nobody wants to own it. We measure logins, licenses, and integrations deployed. An unused credit balance still shows up as consumption.
A story that went right: a US telecom provider
A large telecommunications company, $2B in revenue, born as a divestiture and cloud-first from day one. Billing runs on SAP RISE S/4HANA and SAP BRIM.
The problem
- 40 million billing records, 546 GB a month into Google BigQuery
- SLT pushed raw tables, with no semantic layer
- IT wrote custom queries every time
- Replication ran after hours, so finance worked with yesterday’s data
- 2,000+ manual hours a year
The fix on SAP Datasphere ( now SAP BDC)
- Replaced SLT with Replication Flows
- Custom CDS Views with Change Data Capture for near-real-time data
- Semantic layer built SAP-side, curated data pushed to BigQuery
- 300 tables, 10 to 50 million records each
- Federated Semantic Analytical Model feeding finance in SAP Analytics Cloud
The results (200+ users)
- 3X faster data load and delta replication
- 76% better accuracy on revenue recognition, payments and disputes
- 80 hours a week of manual work gone, about 2 FTE
- Payment reports went from once a day to hourly
Their Director of SAP Infrastructure, Security and Architecture said real-time data and data quality were vital for better decisions and payment approvals. The project went on to win an SAP Innovation Award. Well deserved by the whole team.
What I keep coming back to is that they asked the right questions before the architecture was final, and built for how the business actually ran.
What “Customer-Centric” means to me
It’s not NPS surveys/ CSAT scores, a Product Roadmap, or Renewal call as your health signal.
My test: Can I explain your problems to someone who has never met you?
Three things I believe, none original to me:
- Go where the work happens. Two hours watching a Billing Ops team beats ten executive briefings.
- Ask about workarounds, not wins. The Excel sheets, Overnight batches, the scripts nobody replaced. Each one marks where Technology fell short.
- Look at outcomes you didn’t cause. If a Customer improved something closely associated or next to SAP BTP(Business Technology Platform), ask why. Your Next use case lies there.
“Saturated” Accounts
Flagship use cases live, ACV flat, pressure to find next conversation. I used to read that as a Business problem. Now I read it as Edge of what we understood at implementation.
The customer changed & Our picture of them didn’t. The telecom team treated 1st win as a foundation: Validate, Expand, Go deeper. Their roadmap has SAP Datasphere as main data warehouse and SAP Analytics Cloud(SAC) moving into Predictive & Planning.
The customer hasn’t run out of problems. We’ve run out of understanding Them.
Still working on it
I’m not there in every account. Some of my conversations go fine & have nothing to do with people using the platform. A customer’s silence before they say the gap out loud isn’t satisfaction. It’s accommodation.
The best CSMs (Customer Success Managers) I know get uncomfortable when they can’t explain what a Customer does at Operational level. They ask questions that sound too basic:
- “Walk me through what happens when a Utility transformer fails at 2am.”
- “Take me through your Billing Reconciliation Cycle, step by step.”
When that discomfort goes away, You’ve stopped being efficient and Innovative.
If you have accounts that are live but not visibly better off, I’m glad to compare notes. No agenda.
Sources: SAP BTP Use Cases: Going Deeper, Broader, and Faster (news.sap.com/2023/10/sap-btp-use-cases-deeper-broader-faster/); Cloud Transformation with Customer Success Partner (news.sap.com/2023/12/cloud-transformation-customer-success-partner/); https://www.sap.com/documents/sap-innovation-awards-2024-4362-brightspeed-1033791