#447 Leading Change with SAP: Why Digital Transformation Fails Without Human Transformation - an interview with Christopher Carter by Niels Brabandt
Leading Change with SAP: Why Digital Transformation Fails Without Human Transformation
By Niels Brabandt
When business leaders hear the acronym SAP, many instinctively sigh. They think of complexity, cost, and disruption. Yet, as Christopher Carter, one of the world’s top ten SAP consultants, emphasised in our recent conversation, SAP can be not only transformative but essential to an organisation’s long-term success.
Carter, CEO of Approyo and a veteran of more than two decades in SAP implementation and cloud transformation, joined me for an in-depth discussion on how organisations can lead real change, not only in their systems but in their people.
The Hidden Risk of Delay: When “Later” Becomes “Too Late”
Many companies postpone SAP migration far too long. They rely on a patchwork of outdated systems—Excel sheets, legacy HR tools, unsupported logistics applications, that create hidden vulnerabilities.
“Some of these companies are two and a half years behind on their software patches,” Carter warns. “When you’re that far behind, you’re not only inefficient, you’re exposed to compliance failures, cybersecurity risks, and even government penalties.”
In a world of tightening data regulations, “We did Excel wrong” is not an acceptable defence. Financial authorities and regulators will not tolerate negligence disguised as cost-saving. As Carter notes, “They will simply say, ‘That’s your problem. Where’s the money?’”
The Business Case for Migration: From Cost to Value
Carter acknowledges what many executives think but rarely say: migrating to SAP costs money upfront. However, the long-term benefits outweigh the initial investment.
“Migration is not a one-time cost, it’s a transformation of your operating model,” he explains. “We spread that cost across three to five years. It becomes an operational expense rather than a capital shock.”
The key advantage lies in integration. Instead of running 18 disconnected systems for HR, finance, logistics, and manufacturing, SAP consolidates them into one ecosystem. The result is lower maintenance, greater security, and faster decision-making.
In short: SAP unifies what digital fragmentation breaks apart.
Compliance Is a Leadership Responsibility
One of the most striking revelations from Carter’s consulting experience is how many senior leaders are unaware of their company’s non-compliance.
“The IT team often knows,” he says, “but they don’t communicate it up the chain because they can’t get budget approval. Once the C-level finds out, it’s usually too late.”
The consequences can be catastrophic, both financially and personally. “Just because you didn’t talk to your people doesn’t mean you’re not responsible,” Carter warns. “When you sign compliance documents, you’re liable.”
Leadership accountability, therefore, must include technological awareness. Ignorance of one’s digital infrastructure is no longer defensible, it’s negligence.
Change Management: The Human Core of Transformation
Both Carter and I agreed on one fundamental truth: SAP projects rarely fail for technical reasons. They fail because of people.
“Change management is not optional,” Carter insists. “It’s a business transformation from top to bottom and/or bottom to top.”
The typical workforce composition, especially in long-established companies, poses challenges. “We have the oldest SAP talent pool of any major technology,” he explains. “Many professionals in their 50s don’t want to start over. They’ve done the same process for decades.”
The solution lies in education and inclusion. Training programs, often delivered through certified partners such as New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, are critical to ensure that employees not only use the system but understand its business impact.
Equally important is identifying “super users”, motivated employees who champion the new system internally. “Once you win over these key influencers,” Carter says, “they become your ambassadors. They show others how SAP makes their work easier, not harder.”
Leadership Must Lead, Not Observe
Even the best change management strategy fails without top-level commitment. “If the C-level isn’t enforcing participation, projects collapse,” Carter notes.
He recalls conversations where executives hesitated to demand staff involvement: “They said, ‘I’m the nice guy; people like me.’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly the problem. You need to be firm. This is mandatory.’”
Leadership during transformation requires a balance between empathy and authority. It’s about setting clear expectations, assigning ownership, and ensuring that transformation is not treated as a side project, but as a strategic imperative.
AI and SAP: Augmentation, Not Automation
Carter’s outlook on artificial intelligence in SAP is pragmatic. He highlights SAP Joule, the company’s AI platform that integrates large and small language models into SAP workflows.
“AI doesn’t replace people, it enhances them,” he says. “It’s about making your team faster and smarter, not redundant.”
Carter’s firm uses SAP Joule internally across finance, HR, and customer support: “We eat our own dog food,” he quips. The result? Increased efficiency without sacrificing human oversight.
As with any technology, AI’s value depends on how it’s implemented—and how well leaders prepare their teams for its use.
Where to Begin: A Strategic Roadmap
For organisations overwhelmed by where to start, Carter’s advice is clear:
Evaluate your current applications. Know what exists, what’s redundant, and what’s obsolete.
Assess your data. Decide between a greenfield (start from scratch), bluefield (hybrid), or brownfield (full migration) approach.
Build in stages. “You don’t tear down your old system overnight,” Carter stresses. “We build behind it, test it, and transition gradually.”
SAP migration, in his words, is “like raising a child, baby steps first, then full maturity.”
Conclusion: Leading Change Means Leading People
The conversation with Christopher Carter underscores a timeless truth: successful digital transformation is not about software, it’s about leadership.
As I concluded in our discussion, “SAP isn’t scary, it’s a necessity. Data compliance and process transparency are not luxuries but survival tools.”
Carter agrees: “This is not a tech upgrade. It’s a business transformation.”
And as every leader knows, transformation begins not with systems, but with mindset.
About the Authors
Niels Brabandt is the Founder and Owner of NB Networks with offices in Zurich and London. He is an international expert on Sustainable Leadership, offering Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, and Project & Interim Management.
Learn more at www.NB-Networks.biz.
Christopher Carter is the CEO of Approyo, globally recognised as one of the world’s top SAP consultants. With decades of experience in cloud transformation and SAP implementation, he is the author of 17 books on SAP and AI.
More at www.Approyo.com.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
When I tell you we talk about SAP, probably some of you will say oh God no, anything but not that, but SAP actually can be a good thing for your business. And we have one of the world leading experts here, industry area actually called one of the top 10 SAP consultants worldwide. Hello and welcome, Chris Carter.
Chris Carter
Good day, thank you for having me. I'm excited.
Niels Brabandt
Thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. Let's face it, most people come from their formal education, let's say they go from high school to college somewhere to the job world. So usually it is from your advanced to calculus to advanced calculus. And when the job world begins, you end up with Microsoft Excel sheets. So that is probably the development you probably heard of. And as soon as someone gets in touch with SAP, the usual complaints are it's not very self explanatory, it's very hard to implement and as soon as we change anything, it's basically a nightmare from start to finish. And then we already prepare for the next nightmare.
So when people say my business is on because let's face it, many businesses go the way, they wait way too long to migrate to SAP. And that can have harrowing consequences. From wrong numbers straightforward to regulatory and compliance issues. And in worst case, financial authorities will not, you will not let you get away with saying sorry, we did Excel wrong. They will simply say that's your problem, not ours and where's the money? So when someone asks you this very broad question, how can my business actually migrate to SAP, what's your answer on that one?
Chris Carter
Well, it's actually very easy. SAP has the ability to help any company of any size migrate their applications. And when I say applications, typically an SMB customer or a mid tier market target that hasn't migrated to an ERP package yet, has multiple packages. They have an HR package, they have a finance package, they typically have a different logistics package package, they have maybe a warehouse management package. They have all these different applications out there. Well, SAP bundles that all together into one. So you save money, time, you don't have to worry about all these different packages upgrading, all of them being attacked by cyber security.
And I literally talk to them, guys, you've got 18 different packages here. Is everything up to date? Are you secure? Have you been hit by any ransomware attacks? Have you been hit by any cyber attacks? Because that application that we just did a validation on, you are literally two and a half years behind on your hot packs. It's crazy.
I was just talking with somebody before this meeting that somebody told me we did an Evaluation. We ran our tools and we were looking, said, oh, everything is great over. I'm looking at some of their Microsoft patches all alone and I'm like, holy cow, when was the last time you turned that server off and actually did the updates that you're supposed to? So yes, that's how I literally laid out. I can either scare the living bejesus out of them or I can be honest with them. And I tend to be very honest and I tell them, the ugly warts, that they have their babies ugly. Now let's take your baby and turn it into a beautiful prince or princess.
Niels Brabandt
So when we now talk about this migration, many people say, okay, we got this, 18 packages. And the first thing people will think, okay, look, 18 packages and maybe two or three or six or eight are for us. And it will be expensive because packages mean it's, it's scalable and it scales from here to there. So when I want to migrate from what I have right now, because many people will say, hey, Excel is just there. And we do Excel or whatever tiny tool they have from some proprietary vendor which probably doesn't exist anymore in five years. So they have, but they will probably say, but this tool's running and it's working right now. Migration cost me money.
So how can anyone claim and say this migration is going to save me? Because you just say I can save time, I can save money. Many people say, as soon as I hear SAP, I usually do not think of saving anything, neither time nor money. What's your take on that?
Chris Carter
So my take on that is, you are correct, it is going to cost you upfront to do a migration. But I know what we do, what we do is we spread that cost over multiple years so that whatever their licence is going to be, if it's three or five year licence package, we'll take that cost and spread it over those three and five years so it becomes a different OPEX versus Capex and so on. Plus the fact that it's going to a club now, the big one I get all the time is, well, we've already paid for this, this hardware and we're just going to leave it running on this hardware.
Niels Brabandt
Mm.
Chris Carter
Well, you haven't updated that hardware in four years. You haven't done anything to make sure that that hardware. And oh, by the way, do you realise that running it in a broom closet is not the most optimal way to run an AS400 these days? Just saying.
Niels Brabandt
Who could have thought? Who could have.
Chris Carter
Oh my Lord. So I try to break things down and yes, there is a cost associated with everything. But if you take the list of applications that you currently have, how far behind they are, what you got to do for updates, what they're needing you to do to be compliant, what maybe the government's asking you to do, or the IRS or wherever you tend to be in the world, whatever your government entities say, you must be compliant with this. I've got Fedramp customers that literally are not gov cloud compliant because running on a completely unvalidated, unsupported and I look at them every week and I just say guys, if one thing breaks or if the Fed's coming here and you are a high level manufacturer, one thing happens, you're gonna be paying multiple thousand millions of dollars and thousands on top of that of fees and all these be smarter about it. So I take that cost and I kind of spread it out and as I spread it out it gets thinner and thinner and then they can consume that cost. Yeah, because let's be honest, they won't have the people certified and they won't have their people ready to be able to do those migrations. They won't have the hardware knowledge, they won't have the cloud knowledge.
They wanted the application out. So I take all of that together and I bundle it and as I spread it across that three and five it becomes more consumable for them, it becomes Nutella rather than trying to choke down the big whopper steak which is 64 ounces.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah, absolutely, excellent point here. And do you think that these people are non compliant because they are unaware of it or do do think they know they are not compliant and they just don't care?
Chris Carter
I think that there are both in every company I talked to the one organisation that I'm working with right now to get them compliant, the sea level did not understand that they were not compliant. The IT staff knew that, that they were not compliant and were kind of pushing it down line because they weren't getting budget and they weren't get. So they weren't necessarily telling the executives and, and the people at the top of the food chain. And so you had two levels and once these C levels found out, all hell broke loose. Because they're the ones that interact with the federal government, they're the ones, they're.
Niels Brabandt
Also liable for it. I think there are certain liabilities when you are a CEO of a business, something goes wrong, they will go to the top of the chain and say look, this is your decision making here.
Chris Carter
Yeah, just because you didn't talk to your people is not my problem. You sign those documents that say we're a complaint. Once you sign those, Doc. So it's, it's interesting because the CEO and the CIO didn't know what the Director of applications was doing and how they were. And so that individual actually got fired for putting them in the wrong position. They brought somebody in and we're working now with all that and it's, it can be a total complete mess and it's, it's sad. Sad really, because these, this isn't that difficult of a process.
If you take your current applications, there are, they're templates, pre built templates that we use every day. And it's just getting people to know and understand what they are and then hiring a smart company like ours to do the activities for you and spread that cost over three to five years, boom, you're done.
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely. Absolutely. One additional thing, of course I have because you know, you can do all of that for them. But of course then they will say, look, we all know these case studies where they say SAP came in and everything got brilliant from there. And usually some people will say this is typically a business which is run either in New York City or somewhere in California. Then there was like Chris, Chris. We are a owner led business in North Dakota or Iowa.
We don't have people who say yay, a new tech thing. And we also don't have people who say change is always a chance for me to develop. They say, look, I show up, I love this job but I want to do it and I want to do it in silence. Don't approach me with anything change. And suddenly you show up and say you should migrate to SAP.
I work for Microsoft and New Horizons Computer Learning Centre. As we tend to say that, it's hardly ever a tech problem, more an acceptance problem. How do you overcome that? People are probably unwilling to change from a system which is maybe running for a decade or longer and then migrating to a new system, including learning the whole system. How do you overcome that?
Chris Carter
Oh yes, because change management is a huge component. That's why I love New Horizons because they help educate individuals and they get them to move from this day to day activity to seeing the business plan. Because an SAP implementation migration is a business transformation and the individuals that are there, let's be honest, right now we have the oldest and I'm one of them. I'm 56, the oldest SAP talent pool of any technology that's out there. People don't typically come out of college and say, oh, I Want to be an SAP consultant? Yay. Yeah, I, I sure didn't.
I got talked into it because I was doing an internship at Coca Cola back in the day and I just stayed my whole career because I saw the value of what I was doing and why I started building companies. So when you've got these individuals that are on site, they're literally the ones that are saying, no, I don't want to do this. You have to talk to them about the business and talk to them about their life because if they're in their 50s, they really don't want to start all over again. So they're going to look for another Microsoft job or they're going to look for an Excel job, whatever. But if you've got kids that are, and I say kids that are in their 20s and 30s, those are the ones you want to win over because you want to talk to them about the value that it's going to bring not only to their career but also to the value that it's going to bring to the business. And the two of those married hand in hand. Once you get those convinced and you start finding those golden apples, we call them our super users and SAP HE users.
Finding those, those are the ones that I love to just bring in because then they'll start talking to the others in the company and they'll start talking more and more, hey, we're doing this. Hey, we're going to be doing the AI for us. Hey, we're, this is going to save us on this. Hey, we're going to be. Those are the ones that are motivated. So you get more soft motivated C level person and, and those motivated individuals that are your super users. Oh, then the change management happens, then you bring in new horizons and then you start doing the change management across the entire organisation because you cannot skip change management in any SAP migration.
And if somebody who's watching this video is out there going, ah, we don't need. No, it is a business transformation from top, from bottom to top.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Chris Carter
Everything SAP wise.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. So you would say if someone says we install the software and from there we just take it without any professional training, you would always say train the people properly by certified vendors, 100%.
Chris Carter
I tell every company we work with and there's a full day that we have a discussion. What is your change management strategy? Who's going to be doing the change management? Where are you going to start with your super users? What? Who are the individuals on your team that are going to be able to take on this runs? Who are who cannot take on this responsibility.
And you as an employer need to find other avenues for them to be successful in your corporation. And there are times I've watched individuals literally break down and cry knowing that there are individuals within their company that will not be able to handle what's going on and they're going to have to be either move or get moved out. And every one of them's like that.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. So one thing I have to ask because I'm personally interested in that I work for companies, of course, which use SAP. And especially when it comes to super users or key users or however you want to call them, you probably know how projects start and how they develop it starts. And one department say, oh, we have eight super motivated super users, key users. And by times like, yeah, we're very busy at the moment. So it's more like four and two weeks before it's like, look, two people called in sick and actually the other two are also very busy. So we have like, no, like zero to one.
Maybe someone can do something two hours a week or something. How do you handle this meltdown from. Oh, we have all these key users very motivated to. Yeah, but they're all stuck in daily business.
Chris Carter
So that's where it starts with the C level. You've got to have a very strong either CEO, cio, cfo, somebody who is just got a set of cojones. He or she needs to mandate you will present an individual that will do 20 hours a week or they'll be there for four years. It is not negotiable. That individual must be here for the betterment of our business, the betterment of the team and the betterment of this project.
Niels Brabandt
And.
Chris Carter
And you really have to lay that down. I've had to go to lunches and dinners with sea levels and literally tell them, look, you're way too nice. I get it, you're the nice guy in the company. People come to you because you're nice. But now is where you need to set the line in the sand. And this is mandatory. No ifs, ands or buts about it.
This is what's going to happen. And you need to find that individual and you need to make sure that that individual brings that down the entire food chain. Anytime you don't have a strong sea level, then I've had to come in and I've had to play the bad guy. No problem with that because that's what they pay me to do. I'm the executive of this company to do that. And as long as he Says Chris has full autonomy and I make him or her make sure that that is known. If I walk into that room and I ask questions I expect answers to because I'm.
My ass is on the line for your project and your ass is on the line for the project that we're supporting you with. So I really make sure that it's known. I am a nice guy, but I will lay the hammer down when it needs to be hammered down for them to make sure that they can save face if it needs to.
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely. Also, they hold you accountable to all the deadlines you agreed up in the first place. And of course we all know management commitment extremely important. So to wrap this all up now as the final question of this interview and now some people sit there and think, I think this is something we probably talked about for a while and we always pushed it further and further. However, when I now really don't know where to start because we have so many things going on, maybe there is a lot of business coming in, maybe there are businesses who are on the good side of the economy and say, look, we are very, very busy and I really can't see where in live business because we can't afford any interruption. We can move, migrate during real time operations which are probably in logistics, 24 hours, 365 a year. Where to start when it comes to migrating to SAP, what is your experience there and your top tips?
Chris Carter
Well, the first top tip I would say is please reach out to me on LinkedIn and introduce yourself, say you heard me on the podcast and let's have a conversation because I can walk you through that scenario. It is not a big bang. What we're going to do is we're going to first do an evaluation of your current applications and that's what you need to do too. Then you need to do an evaluation of your data. You do need to do make sure that you're either going to go greenfield, bluefield or brownfield. Most companies go either greenfield and start from scratch and start bringing in dibs and drabs of their data of their current applications. Some of them, the majority will then go Bluefield very little, go Brownfield very little.
Just bring everything in and go to them. You are not going to do a big bang where all of a sudden on one full week everything's going to be done. You don't want that because you haven't trained, you haven't done your data, you haven't done your application, you haven't even set up your systems. When we do these Types of things. We're setting up systems, we're setting up systems in a tiered process. You're going to start with a sandbox and you're going to test data, you're going to test how the SAP, you're going to have individuals that are going to do some testing in there and, and we're going to do tests and that process, we call it stair stepping, you're going to take steps, just like when you raise a child, you're going to take baby steps to young child steps all the way up the process. And those pieces of the puzzle are laid out in a longer timeline so you'll have the opportunity to be able to learn and to get your system set up.
And remember, this is not taking away from your current landscape, wherever that may be, this is building behind it. So when we tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev, we're going to bring that, that new system is going to be there and it's going to be this golden pristine system that everybody's going to know how to use and you're going to have the ability, you're still going to have your old system for, for a little bit of a period of time while we go through hypercare. But then that data gets put into storage, blob storage if it's seven years old and now you're going to have this nice clean, pristine. But again it takes time so people need to give up time. You need to have budgets for those and then again we spread that cost and that time across the length of your licences and support an organisation from the beginning to the end to make sure that they're, they're stable and that's what you want. You want, you don't want this and then just want this.
That's what we try to make sure that everybody's on the same page with us on.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. Perfect. Final answer. Of course.
One bonus question I have because some people now say, look Chris, when we migrate, I heard about this thing where many people talk about like do anything with AI anything like AI something and suddenly the magic happens and we just can focus on our business rather than just the systems. What is the state of the affair, state of art at the moment when it comes to SAP? Is it something where small mid sized business can even think about? Is it something which only corporations can afford? Where do you think SAP stands on AI at the moment?
Chris Carter
So AI has a great tool called Juul J O U L E As a matter of fact, I was just at an event in Las Vegas, Nevada. Between my gambling sessions, I went to different technology sessions. They have a fantastic tool with predefined templates and predefined AI learning LLMs, large language models and small language models.
Niels Brabandt
Large.
Chris Carter
It's actually I wrote several books about SAP migrations. I wrote them about the AI. There's actually what I've got, 17 books and four of them are just wrapped around SAP AI. So I talked to these organisations. Look, it's going to make your people better. It's going to make you a better company. It is not going to replace your people, it's going to make them better employees. It's not going to do everything for you, it is going to do something for you.
You can ask the bots and you can ask the templates and have those predefined and set up, but it's not going to make, you know, everything, do everything without a human intervention. And that's the, that's the thing people need to realise with that it does not do everything for you. It will help make you do things better that you and faster that you used to do. And the SAP jewel, I run it here, we use it for our customer support operations, we use it for our finance and hr. We actually eat the dog food from it. And every time I go and see Andrew Sini and others as part of the team, it's amazing what they're working on. But again, it's not going to take you 100% out of the picture.
It's going to make you bigger, better, stronger and faster, just like the Six Million Dollar man did. We can rebuild it and we'll make it better.
Niels Brabandt
Perfect. This is the very, very final question, I promise. Now, you already mentioned LinkedIn. When? Now people hear this and say, I think we need to get in touch with Chris. How can they reach out to you? You mentioned LinkedIn.
Anything else you'd like to mention?
Chris Carter
Yeah, I've got our corporate website, which is a P P R-O-Y-O.com. you can reach me there. You can reach me on any of the social medias. They've got me all over the place. I do respond to individuals who reach out to me directly.
So you can do that. You can do our info@app royal.com. i get a copy of those when they come in, I read them and if people want to have a conversation with me, I'll respond to it automatically and let marketing team know that I'm taking responsibility for those so I'm always available. And then once we have a connection, I'm always willing to talk on a phone, do a zoom call, teams calls. As a matter of fact, somebody. Actually, in 15 minutes, I have a meeting with an individual who I met through a podcast who's reached out several times and has asked maybe a dozen questions. And we're just sit here and have a conversation, and I'm going to let them ask the questions away.
I think they're bringing a couple of individuals from their company. It's just so they can get knowledge. I've already sent them several of my books and just said, here, this is a baseline. This is the basement of your new home. Let's make sure it's strong first before you build that house. And we are going to go from there. We're going to have some good conversation.
I'm going to get a coffee and an espresso and go from there.
Niels Brabandt
Perfect. I think these are the final words we see. SAP isn't as scary as many people think. And also, let's face it, it's a necessity today because when we're not compliant on the data, it's basically a catastrophe in the making. Let's prevent this from happening in. SAP is an excellent solution for that. So at the end of this podcast and videocast, there's only one thing left for me to say.
Chris Carter, thank you very much for your time.
Chris Carter
Thank you. We'll see you soon.