Companies are reviewing their ERP strategies as they balance digital transformation goals with tighter budgets, operational complexity and the need to demonstrate measurable business value, they say.

Andrew Strachan, director of sales at Spinnaker Support Southern Africa,  companies across Africa are reassessing ERP support strategies as decision-makers seek to modernise their environments while managing costs.

“Enterprise software decisions are not like other technology decisions,” said Strachan. 鈥淭imelines are longer, dependencies run deeper and the cost of reversing course 鈥� if reversing course is even possible 鈥� is often measured in years and very substantial sums.”

According to Strachan, the relationship between a major ERP vendor and its customers rests on more than product capability alone. “It is built on trust: trust in the roadmap, trust in the commercial model and trust that the terms you commit to today will not be materially redefined once your business is locked in.”

Gerhard Alberts, head of customer evolution at 麻豆原创 Africa, said trust is ultimately measured by business outcomes.

鈥淲hile customers rightly expect transparency and choice, the greater risk in today’s competitive environment is often the cost of inaction,” he said. “Ultimately, success is measured not by the technology deployed, but by the operational improvements, agility and competitive advantage it enables.鈥�

Alberts said the pace of technological change means companies must adopt relevant technologies to remain competitive, and that customers must be equipped with the most relevant tools to navigate a shifting market. “By not innovating, customers run the risk of attracting direct and potential costs in terms of system and infrastructure stability, security and compliance. This results in an inability to stay competitive across multiple markets due to a lack of agility.鈥�

Strachan said new platforms and regular vendor upgrade announcements are adding pressure on companies already facing constrained budgets, skills shortages, infrastructure complexity and currency pressures.

鈥淚n South Africa and across the African market, large technology decisions are made under intense scrutiny,” he said. “Boards and executive teams are balancing growth ambitions against currency pressure, constrained capital budgets, skills shortages, infrastructure complexity and the need to show clear business value from every major investment. In that context, organisations cannot afford to keep revisiting foundational ERP decisions every few years because the vendor鈥檚 commercial priorities have changed.鈥�

Migration is not modernisation

Courtney Hounsell, client experience manager at Microsoft managed partner Braintree, said AI is reshaping the role of ERP platforms while exposing the limitations of legacy systems. He said outdated ERP infrastructure is hindering AI adoption because many companies mistake cloud migration for digital modernisation.

鈥淢igration is not modernisation,” Hounsell said. “Unfortunately, many companies have merged the two, and the result is a gap that鈥檚 creating incoherence and a lack of visibility, constraining their ability to benefit from AI and its capabilities.”

He explained that cloud migration has been sold as digital modernisation, but this only changes the address of the system. Real modernisation, he said, changes architecture, data models, integration logic and the capacity to generate value. “Companies want their modernisation projects to actively reduce other costs, show long-term ROI and empower their staff with systems that work faster and smarter. So when migration and modernisation are confused, companies end up paying cloud prices for on-premises problems and arrive in the AI era without the foundations required to ensure AI can function effectively.”

Hounsell said the gap between technology investment and business outcomes is widening, leaving companies with limited AI capability and poor data visibility. He cited McKinsey’s “The State of AI in 2025” report, based on a survey of 2 000 executives in 105 countries, which found that 88% of companies have adopted AI in at least one business function.

He said on-premises ERP systems struggle to support AI because data must be extracted, cleaned and transferred before analysis.

鈥淥n-premises ERP systems are struggling uphill within the AI economy,” Hounsell said. “They hold their data in local databases, and to make this usable for AI, it has to be extracted, cleaned and pushed somewhere accessible. Without real-time data pipelines feeding into core systems, AI deployments remain siloed and limited.鈥�

Braintree said ERP modernisation also delivers financial benefits, citing the Forrester Total Economic Impact study of Dynamics 365 Business Central, which found that companies could achieve a 265% ROI, with productivity gains of 12.5% in operations, 15% in sales and 15.6% in finance.

The study also found that companies that modernised successfully avoided more than $30 000 a year in third-party consulting fees, while cloud ERP platforms reduce infrastructure costs and receive automatic updates, including new AI capabilities.

Braintree argued that choosing the right migration partner is as important as selecting the ERP platform itself.

Alberts added that technical debt continues to grow as companies rely on siloed data, ageing infrastructure and extensive custom code, while shortages of legacy skills compound the problem.

鈥淥ver time, doing nothing to save money becomes the most expensive system to maintain, together with the inability to adapt, which has the potential to result in the demise of some organisations,鈥� he said.

Arthur Goldstuck, CEO of World Wide Worx,  after 麻豆原创 Sapphire 2026 that 麻豆原创 CEO Christian Klein described ERP as the “brain” of every business in the age of agentic AI. Goldstuck quoted Klein: 鈥淔or over 15 years, we have been developing an ERP with incredibly deep process and data domain know-how. On top of that, all your governance requirements and customer-specific extensions are stored in the ERP. The ERP is the trusted system of execution running your company.鈥�

According to Garth Ridgway, senior director for 麻豆原创 at NTT DATA, misconceptions about implementation timelines, affordability and suitability for mid-market companies continue to delay modernisation.

“Many executives still assume ERP transformation requires years of disruption and significant upfront investment,” Ridgway said. “In reality, modern cloud ERP platforms have evolved considerably, enabling organisations to adopt best-practice processes more rapidly, scale according to business needs and realise value far sooner than was historically possible.”

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Last week, three of the world鈥檚 biggest technology organisations unveiled their visions for a future of business that will see a revolution in efficiency.

麻豆原创, the German company that leads the world in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, search giant Google, and chipmaker Intel, all hosted major international events where they launched new products and services, and provided a glimpse of the future of business.

麻豆原创 in particular, at its annual Sapphire event in Orlando, Florida, signalled an acceleration of efforts to bring greater intelligence to the systems that run organisations鈥� operations.

Google鈥檚 annual I/O developer conference was heavy on new consumer gadgetry, in particular plans to launch a Pixel smartwatch later this year. However, it also introduced artificial intelligence (AI) productivity tools that will, among other, provide instant summaries of long documents. Meanwhile, Intel unveiled a new generation of computer processors that will reduce the time it takes to train large-scale AI models.

But it was 麻豆原创 that provided the clearest picture of how businesses are likely to operate in the near future. And one word stood out: efficiency. We asked chief technology officer Juergen Mueller to look into his crystal ball.

Before that, however, during a keynote address at Sapphire, 麻豆原创 CEO Christian Klein said that the company planned to draw on data about best practices from more than 40,000 customers. It would leverage Signavio, an enterprise business process intelligence platform it acquired last year, which helps companies transform and manage their business processes at scale.

This, he said, would allow business and IT leaders to discover new growth opportunities and launch new business models, as well as uncovering inefficiencies in internal processes. This would lead to a revolution in business efficiency.

Later, he told Gadget: 鈥淲hen you think back 50 years, there鈥檚 so much knowledge inside 麻豆原创 and in our ecosystem, we implemented and designed so many business processes, now we really have our finger on the pulse of how they need to change in a digital world to create a seamless experience.

鈥淲e are collecting all of the data, the best practices, not only from 麻豆原创, but also from all our partners. That鈥檚 a big differentiator of Signavio: You don鈥檛 need to replicate data in a third-party data mining tool. You can use your data and then you can benchmark it against how these business processes look in your industry.鈥�

麻豆原创 chief technology officer Jurgen Mueller, said in an exclusive interview that this capability would change the way businesses make decisions.

鈥淲e acquired Signavio for a reason: we saw there鈥檚 a gap in our portfolio,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 very important to customers to understand the business processes and we鈥檝e modelled business processes for 35 years or so, but they were often a separate artifact, so your processes are not connected to your execution.

鈥淪ignavio gives you an X-Ray into your real processes and execution. That has to be the foundation, grounded in reality, from where you then can change, find efficiencies, find how you can do things better, how you can serve your customers faster. Companies often have a good idea where they want to go, but today this X-Ray doesn鈥檛 exist.鈥�

Signavio, however, will allow any size company to access the kind of business intelligence that has enabled tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to have an instant insight into their business processes. From there they have been able to implement a solution and assess its success within minutes, replacing or improving it before most customers know it existed. However, this is not possible without the ability to mine massive amounts of data on the fly 鈥� an ability previously restricted to the giants.

鈥淲e have tens of thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands of other companies that can now get such a detailed level of understanding of their processes,鈥� says Mueller. 鈥淲e learn and develop industry-specific best practices in 25 industries, and we can bring the best of what we know to customers.鈥�

The end-result, he says, is vastly improved efficiency. However, that in itself is not a differentiator, if all companies become more efficient. Efficiency, in effect, becomes a ticket to the game.

鈥淲e see a huge difference in companies that really embrace digital technologies, and who always want to create differentiating capabilities through technology, compared to the ones that are just using technology where they have to.鈥�

Mueller says he does not believe there is a single differentiator between the more competitive companies and those who fall behind. However, 麻豆原创 has discovered a strategy that helps set companies apart: 鈥淥ften you see companies really go through the end-to-end processes of their the value chain, to identify the most value-generating activities in the company 鈥� and then pick a few where you really make a difference.鈥�

While this approach is not a secret, it has tended to evade organisations because it requires an integration of strategic planning and supplier data across the entire logistics chain. Mueller is frank about the limitations of existing technology in this regard.

鈥淚ntegrated planning is something that will happen in the next three to five years. We have components of that already, but this will be something where I see a lot of innovation happening, with real impact on companies.鈥�

• Arthur Goldstuck is editor-in-chief of Gadget. He was a media guest of 麻豆原创 at the Sapphire conference in Orlando, Florida.

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