Here’s Looking at You Kid, SAP!

“Thanks for taking the time to meet with me today, SAP, for a quick get-together. And no, I don’t drink. That is probably an interesting thing to hear from a consultant, considering all the places we’ve been and adventures we’ve seen. I know a few stories, but I’ll leave those where they belong—in the past. Back in the road-warrior days, I was the type to do the work and head back to my room. But enough of that.

I know you’re busy. Very busy. Between the end of ECC support, convincing customers to move to S/4HANA, cloud strategy, subscription models, and now AI, you’ve got a full plate. So I won’t keep you long.

I really just wanted to say thank you—for more than 25 years of partnership, travel, opportunity, and a lifestyle I never could have imagined when this all started. I come to this moment not in awe of what we achieved, but wanting to make sure we end this chapter on a positive note. Not that it’s the absolute end, but I know you have new places to go and new people to run with. And me? I’m still that purchasing guy who met you at 39 years old, thought you were worth knowing, and jumped onboard.

Those early days were something.

I came from supporting a corporate U.S. purchasing operations for a global tire company, and before that I was an industrial engineer and production supervisor. I understood how business actually worked on the ground. I know that does not always count for much now, when it seems the focus is more on knowing how the software works than how the business works. These days, sometimes it feels like all it takes to be an SAP consultant is some training, a little rote memory, and a low billing rate. I probably shouldn’t have said that—but there it is.

Truth be told, I never learned all that much from the classes themselves myself, though I attended plenty of them. But the trips? Waltham, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Irvine, Toronto, and many more—those were memorable. And in many cases, I knew more than the instructors anyway. What I did gain, combined with my experience, allowed me to travel across the country training our more than 400 people across multiple modules, while my wife held things together at home with our four-year-old twin girls. That part was hard. But we made it work.

And to be honest, I knew of you even before the R/3 days, when Continental, a German company, was one of the early adopters of R/2. I was around before the “Enjoy” version, when you started putting N’s in the transaction codes. There were bugs in those early R/3 years—3.1G and 3.1H especially—but we made it work. I even worked with someone who helped open the first SAP offices in North and South America. He was one of the first five SAP employees outside Germany.

After that implementation, once the money started talking, I left and became an SAP consultant, and our whirlwind relationship really took off.

When I started, I knew my craft. We didn’t have Google or AI back then to answer every question. You had to understand the business, the process, and the system. But the travel—that was the deal with the devil, as I used to call it. Before I even got to my first consulting project, I was already on the road for training: three days at a resort in Tampa, then a week of team-building in Annecy, France, in the French Alps. Very cool.

Then came my first project: Bermuda, in the winter, for three months. Beautiful place—but I missed my family terribly. I never told my wife this, but one weekend when she brought our four-year-old twin girls to visit, we went to church. While she took them to the restroom, I went to the altar and cried like a baby because I missed them so much. That was life for an early road warrior: fly out Sunday evening, work all week, fly home Friday, get one day at home, then do it all over again. A lot of people didn’t make it through that life, so I’m thankful things eventually changed.

I still remember 9/11. I was in Chicago. Flights were grounded, so I had to drive home that Friday. By Monday, I was back on a plane—with maybe five passengers onboard.

So yes, SAP, thank you—not just for the work, but for the life. For all the miles, all the cities, all the experiences. New Orleans, Panama City Beach, Coronado Island, Virginia Beach, Biloxi, Charleston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Miami—and internationally, Nigeria, Scotland, Montreal, Toronto, Germany, France, Switzerland, Milan, the Bahamas, and plenty of small towns you could barely get to from anywhere. The food, the budgets, the team dinners, the late nights, the unforgettable moments. The $400 bottles of wine—two of them at lunch, no less.

And beyond the places, there were the people. Great team members. Great clients. People I still keep up with today. I worked with folks in plants, steel mills, mines, offices, C-suites, and even operations I still can’t talk about. I helped help-desk callers, end users, managers, and executives. I always tried to make it about them, because I had been in their shoes once.

I could say a lot more, but I do want to be honest about one thing: I think your focus is a little off.

I understand that innovation is necessary. Adapt or die. But there’s an old saying: you dance with the one who brought you. To be fair, the people who want to work with you today often see things differently too. Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like money—though it was always part of the equation—has become the main focus in a way it wasn’t before. And it cuts both ways.

In the early days, some companies got taken advantage of with high consulting fees, weak implementations, and very little ROI. Then companies pushed back, and along came implementers whose main concern was protecting their margins. Here’s the part that may sound blasphemous: companies often never get to see the best consultants, because implementers present the people who give them the best margins—not always the best results. There was also a time when if you could spell SAP, you were golden. Now there are certifications everywhere, but real business experience still matters. Many new resources know the screens, but they have never had their hands on the plow.

Of course, companies share some blame too. Too often they don’t insist on seeing all the candidates. But that’s a conversation for another day.

I know you’ve got cloud and AI to chase, and I get it. But I also hope we cross paths again.

You gave me and my family an outstanding life. We traveled the world on airline miles and hotel points. We lived comfortably. I praised you to young people I mentored and trained. And now, as a college professor teaching operations management and information technology, I can’t talk about ERP or supply chain without mentioning SAP.

But at this stage in my career, I’m tired of the calls from all over the world from people who don’t know what SAP is. I’m tired of explaining my resume over and over before a submission. I’m tired of being selectively quizzed on transaction codes. I’m tired of the obsession with S/4HANA when, underneath it all, so much of what is behind the curtain has not really changed. Lipstick on a pig is still a pig. I’m tired of hearing about digitalization while employees are still being trained at an analog level. And I’m especially tired of the dance around billing rates when I know the actual rate is double what is being offered.

So I’ll teach. I’ll be a professor. I’ll work on my new initiative, LivingHistory’s, where I help seniors record their life stories. And I’ll get my jazz trio going and play a little music too.

I know you have to go, but I wanted to take this moment to say thank you. It has been a great ride, and I wish you the very best.

I’ve got the tab.

And one more thing—watch out for AI.

It has one less letter than SAP. A lot easier to say and spell

We’ll always have Paris.

Dr. J