“My SAP license costs me 3,000 USD per FUE per year. Why should I pay 8,000 USD per month for a consultant?”
“I pay only 40,000 USD annually as AMC. Eight consultants support my system.”
These lines are often said with pride. They should not be.
SAP is not a product cost problem. It is a people capability problem.
Even finding someone who can read a functional specification, write a coherent explanation, and hold a business conversation in English costs money today. That remark is not literal or elitist. It is a comment on market reality. Skills that combine SAP knowledge, business understanding, and the ability to communicate clearly are scarce.
And scarcity has a price.
This is why there is a real difference between consultants who know SAP, consultants who understand business, and consultants who merely operate SAP screens. Only the first two reduce complexity over time. The third category increases it, quietly and expensively.
When organisations complain that SAP is costly, they are often paying interest on years of underinvestment in thinking. Weak process design, fragile integrations, undocumented workarounds, and poor data ownership do not look expensive on day one. They become expensive later, when support teams multiply and outcomes still do not improve.
One uncomfortable truth also needs saying. SAP is not mandatory. Nor is it a panacea for all your problems. If Tally works well for your business, stick to it. Implementing SAP without organisational readiness does not buy sophistication. It buys confusion.
SAP rewards clarity. It punishes shallow understanding.
If you want to talk about SAP costs in terms of capability, outcomes, and long-term economics rather than headcount arithmetic, that conversation is worth having.
You can start it at lydiangbs.com.
As an aside: FUE is “Full Use Equivalent” (Check out https://community.sap.com/t5/enterprise-resource-planning-blog-posts-by-sap/did-you-say-fue-a-definition/ba-p/13556847 for a more detailed explanation). You see, at Lydian, we believe in speaking in plain business English. Not tech jargon gobbledygook mumbo-jumbo.
