Imagine pouring two years of your career into a transformational SAP project, hitting every milestone, only to see your business users return to spreadsheets for their reporting needs.

You captured requirements.
You built robust data models.
You delivered easy-to-use reports.
You met every project milestone.

So what went wrong?

I’ve seen this scenario repeat on enough large-scale projects to recognize a clear pattern. Even the most well-intentioned efforts fail when one critical element is neglected: training and user adoption.

Why Training Gets Left Behind

Executive leadership often focuses on the most visible, high-risk parts of a transformation—system design, integrations, reporting, and infrastructure. Training, on the other hand, is usually treated as an afterthought. It’s considered low-risk, and as a result, it receives the least amount of time, budget, and resources.

Here’s how it typically plays out:

• A small training team is assembled, often isolated from the main project team.
• That team is responsible for every process area—Finance and Controlling (FICO), Procure to Pay (PTP), Order to Cash (OTC), Production Planning (PP), Material Management (MM), Warehouse Management (WM), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Project Systems (PS), and more.
• The result is a patchwork of self-paced materials, virtual sessions, and in-person workshops.

At first glance, it looks sufficient. But the cracks appear quickly.

Generic Training vs. Real-World Use

Take Finance and Controlling (FICO) as an example. Within FICO are multiple sub-processes—General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Treasury, Consolidations, Tax. The project delivery team may have hundreds of specialists across these functions. The training team? A fraction of that.

What gets delivered is the most generic type of “training” possible: high-level how-to guides copied from product documentation. These are useful for a basic introduction, but they don’t answer the one question that matters most to users:

“How do I do my job in this new system?”

For Emily in Accounting, that means preparing the month-end financial statement her boss needs. Instead of clear, focused steps tailored to her workflow, Emily gets a stack of presentations, videos, and one-size-fits-all workshops. Frustrated, she reverts to what she knows best—Excel.

Multiply Emily’s experience across dozens of roles, and suddenly your multimillion-dollar SAP investment is undercut by a lack of adoption.

Adoption Is the True Measure of Success

The real success of a transformation isn’t the go-live date—it’s whether your people actually use the tools as intended. Without targeted, role-based training, adoption stalls and the business quietly shifts back to old habits.

If you’re nearing go-live, now is the time to act.