Many SAP customers are still being charged heavily for “business process re-engineering” during ERP programmes. What is often not stated clearly is that SAP already provides detailed, standard business process flows as part of its product documentation. These are not high-level sketches. They are end-to-end, role-based process diagrams that cover mainstream enterprise scenarios across finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics.
For example, SAP’s own process flow for customer returns management lays out the complete sequence of activities, decision points, and system interactions. It includes what consultants like to rename as flow diagrams, swimlanes, and mappings, except here they are already validated against SAP S/4HANA functionality and maintained by the product owner itself. In plain English, the software vendor has already done the hard thinking.
This does not mean organisations never need advisory support. They do. What they do not need is to pay repeatedly for reinvention of standard processes under new labels. The real value of consulting lies elsewhere: understanding where your business genuinely deviates from standard processes, deciding whether those deviations are justified, and translating business intent into system behaviour. Paying for diagrams that already exist is not transformation. It is duplication.
At Lydian, we believe enterprise systems should simplify decision-making, not inflate consulting invoices. If you are unsure whether your current SAP programme is paying for insight or just documentation dressed up as expertise, it may be worth a second look.If you want to talk about using SAP’s built-in capabilities more intelligently and spending consulting money where it actually matters, you can start that conversation at lydiangbs.com.
