What Four SAP Customers Reported from the Field
SAP published a feature on August 6, 2026 documenting experiences from four organizations at the SAP Learning and Adoption Forum 2026. The cases span a global shipping company, a German federal agency, a greenfield medical university, and a technical institute managing AI governance for 35,000 users. Each organization shared a version of the same problem: technical deployment and actual workforce adoption are not the same event.
That gap is where ERP programs quietly lose value. The evidence these customers provided is more specific than a survey. It includes budget ratios, go-live survey response rates, and exact timelines.
The Patterns Across the Cases
Hapag-Lloyd, one of the five largest shipping companies in the world, is mid-transformation on SAP S/4HANA Finance. Its "Fast Forward" program covers 4,000 SAP users across more than 140 countries. The organizational change management lead, Dulaan Punsag-Odefey, built a network of 265 key users serving as change ambassadors across six regions. Their job is to translate global process standards into local language and practice.
Controllers are being repositioned from spreadsheet producers into business partners who deliver decision-ready analysis. The explicit workforce message: "It will be different, but better."
The Bundesanstalt für Post und Telekommunikation (BAnst PT), Germany's Federal Agency for Post and Telecommunications, implemented S/4HANA in one year: greenfield, public cloud, 1,000 users, go-live January 1, 2026. In parallel, the agency relocated to a new building under a new-work concept. The change approach rejected token feedback sessions in favor of direct moderation inside business units. A fit-to-standard approach replaced legacy custom processes.
After go-live, survey response rates exceeded 70%, and the agency received dozens of unsolicited thank-you messages about the new SAP travel expense management and Fiori apps.
The Medical University of Lusatia (MuL), built from scratch with 3.6 billion euros in funding, took the most explicit financial position. Thilo Menges described change management as an investment protection measure and allocated 4.3% of the total budget to it — the largest single line item in the SAP contract. MuL follows SAP's change management framework across six dimensions, integrated into the SAP Activate methodology.
Early assessments, target-group-specific communication, and trusted local multipliers replaced broad-brush rollout communication. The program also uses WalkMe for context-sensitive, in-the-flow support on infrequent processes after go-live.
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) faced a different version of the problem. Its challenge was not an ERP rollout. It was governing AI use across 25,000 students and 10,000 employees who were already experimenting independently. Rather than restricting access, KIT built an AI toolbox with governance rules over 18 months. A mandatory qualification module covering foundational knowledge and legal obligations precedes toolbox access. Use-case workshops ran department by department.
Within seven days of the teaching rollout in April 2025, faculty had created 31 didactic chatbots, configured directly in the learning management system. KIT also introduced a budget cap of $25 per person per month after initially offering free access.
What the Research Behind the Cases Shows
SAP invited Prof. Dr. Renate Osterchrist from the Munich University of Applied Sciences to provide an evidence base for the patterns across customers. SAP reported that she analyzed 119 studies on the effectiveness of change interventions across six fields: communication, support, involvement, reinforcement, social influence, and coercion.
The findings that matter most for ERP owners: dialogue formats outperform one-way communication. Manager coaching improves not just leadership capability but measurably raises implementation competence in their teams. The coercion dimension is worth noting: clarity about expected behavior helps adoption. Manipulation and political maneuvering reduce commitment. The widely cited claim that 70% of all change projects fail is not supported by current data.
That last point matters for how organizations frame the risk conversation internally. Failure rates are often invoked to justify heavy governance or to argue against ambitious timelines. Osterchrist's analysis points instead to dialogue quality, manager coaching, and local ownership as effectiveness factors.
Joule Studio 2.0 and Why This Gets Harder with AI Agents
The forum included a live demonstration of Joule Studio 2.0, which lets SAP customers build AI agents that access SAP Knowledge Graph, process models, and domain knowledge. The agents are code-based and transparent. Developers describe a desired outcome in natural language; Joule Studio generates the specification and executable code. Both no-code and pro-code approaches are available.
Customer and partner discussions at the forum made clear that agent deployment amplifies the change management challenge rather than eliminating it. When agents take over tasks, roles change, responsibilities shift, and how people and machines work together must be explicitly managed. Change management that works for a system migration will be equally essential when agents enter a process.
What ERP Owners and Operations Leaders Should Do Next
Three patterns hold across every case.
First, enablement runs before, during, and after deployment. Key users and business leads must be embedded early. They are the multipliers who close the gap between technical availability and actual use.
Second, local ownership is what makes global standards work. A centralized rollout that does not transfer accountability to regional or departmental teams will produce compliance numbers at go-live and declining adoption afterward.
Third, AI requires structured governance, not just access. KIT's path from shadow AI to a governed toolbox took 18 months with a mandatory qualification step. Organizations that skip the qualification step risk facing the same governance problem later, under greater pressure.
For ERP owners and operations leaders in or planning an S/4HANA transformation, the audit question is direct: does your program budget include a named change management line item? Is it sized before go-live rather than funded as a remediation if adoption falls short? The MuL example makes the sequencing concrete. At 4.3% of contract value, change management was the largest single cost in the SAP contract.