This Ramble is one of a series on Deshoring - the deliberate replacement of costly consulting and systems integration services with Agentic AI
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On average, things are average.
That's how averages work.
The Dunning Kruger Effect was defined by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. It's a cognitive bias whereby some individuals lack the metacognitive ability to recognise their own incompetence - people think they're better at doing things than they actually are.
50% of American men believe they could safely land a passenger plane in an emergency with the help of air traffic control. Around 7% of women think they could.
Daniel Kahneman - the man who discovered cognitive bias talks about Regression to Mean - the fact that results are scattered either side of the average meaning that outliers shouldn't be seen as upward or downward indicators of performance, merely the distribution that regress to the mean.
On average, things are average.
I tell you this because my early SAP career took a strange route.
I certified as an MM consultant - doing the 5-week intensive Academy at SAP's Bath Road (UK) office. As a newcomer to SAP (but not IT) I found it tough as a course and exam but never felt out of my comfort zone.
After the course I took a week off to relax before being assigned to my first SAP project. The call came and it was David Lowen...
"So, you're going to be doing an SD lead role at a toilet roll manufacturer - you start next week."
I laughed and reminded Dave that I'd done my MM Academy, not SD.
There'd been some kind of mix up.
"Ah, you'll be fine. SD is the opposite of MM, just flip it all around in your head and you'll be fine…"
And that was that.
I did an SD project. And nailed it. Orders, Deliveries, Pricing, Output Determination, Billing, Logistics Information System, spec'd a cross-docking solution before it was mainstream in SAP and also spec'd an ABAP that would ensure one pallet layer was flat to enable a second pallet layer of mixed products on top to optimise truck load.
It was an Accelerated SAP (aka ASAP) project, so we were live in 7 months, and I had my first project under my belt.
Next up - an MM lead role at a Utility and another ASAP project. I had a week to kill between projects, so I sat the SD Academy exam, passed it and was dual certified in 9 months.
Back in 1998 that was like finding a Golden Ticket in your Willy Wonka Bar.
The phone rang a lot from recruiters, and I ended up joining PwC for twice my salary.
Kerching.
Plus, they were opening a new office in Manchester - 12 miles away. I would be employee number 6 and could help shape the newly formed Outsourcing practice.
This was Outsourcing well before Offshoring was mainstream in the SAP world. We were providing Application Management Services to SAP customers and mainly focusing on big PwC projects that needed to be stabilised and supported so the team could roll off to their next big gig.
Spider-Man got his superpowers from a radioactive spider bite.
I got mine building SAP support teams to stabilise hugely complex (and in hindsight badly implemented) PwC projects.
It was like being in a tumble drier.
With a wolf.
But I was 29 and invincible. I just sucked it up and got on with it.
Wind forwards a few years and I'd become the person best known in the UK for setting up SAP Centers of Excellence. First within PwC, then a few other consulting firms, then Gartner would send people my way (thanks Derek Prior).
"If you're going live with a big SAP system, you need to speak to Stuart."
Like most good consultants, I'd made it all up.
I came up with my own model that was based on what I'd learned on those big PwC projects. My take on CoEs was different from most people though. And, fuelled by a few exceptional colleagues (especially Nick Coburn) I'd created a killer model that catered for in-house capabilities and outsourcing if that was the preferred direction, but critically, also focused on business capabilities alongside IT support.
This focus on well-rounded, self-sufficiency for SAP customers was the reason I founded Resulting in 2004. I wanted to focus on this space, helping SAP customers become more self-sufficient to get the value they expected out of the SAP investment.
I've spoken all over the world on the subject of Centers of Excellence and continue to get messages from people asking if we can help.
Trouble is, on average things are average.
The term Centers of Excellence is a misnomer. Most are average, obvs.
But you can't really call them Centers of Mediocrity, can you?
BTW - I tend to give this CoE knowledge away for free now. You can download our CoE toolkit for free on the website somewhere. And, if you catch me on a good day, I'll tell you the single biggest secret to the CoEs that truly are Excellent.
Over the years, our propositions at Resulting have evolved away from CoE advice.
We now provide independent customer-side SAP consultancy focused on S/4HANA roadmap and business cases (aka Phase Zero). We've done this for some of the world's biggest SAP customers. We're really good at it.
We also provide customer-side embedded SAP delivery management, working within our clients alongside their SI to ensure their SAP programme delivers. Think Programme Management, Architecture, Testing, Change Management, Cutover.
We do all the stuff the SI won't do, can't do and shouldn't do.
More recently, we've been helping S/4HANA clients to deliver value following their ECC>S/4HANA migration too, as this is an emerging need and fits well with our skills.
Our ethos across all of this is what has become the 1st Principle of Deshoring in my Deshoring Manifesto:
"Customer Self-Sufficiency over Vendor Dependency."
We get frustrated when SAP customers are beholden to SIs. When they have to pay high rates to get simple stuff done. When they've been corralled down a bad solution design route because they didn't have the ability to challenge their SI.
When we built our Agentic AI SAP consultant S4SensAI, we used it internally to super charge our consulting teams. It gave them access to new levels of S/4HANA knowledge and experience they'd never had before. It made us more effective; we started giving much better customer advice and we could deliver our S/4HANA Phase Zero engagements faster and at a lower price point.
Then I remembered my early days building Centers of Excellence. I remembered that we founded Resulting to drive customer self-sufficiency.
"Shall we turn this into a product and put it in our customers' hands so they massively reduce their dependency on SIs?"
Was my thinking out loud question to the team.
There were nods. A little bit of face pulling. Awkward silence as nobody likes challenging their CEO in public (which is the most annoying thing about being a CEO btw).
"But then they won't need us…."
Came the response eventually.
"Yes but, that's what self-sufficiency is about."
Said somebody else.
So, with Deshoring, should customers build their own SAP skill in-house and ditch their SI or AMS partner?
Well, yes.
At least partially.
Do the maths - $1,500 per day is $350,000 per year.
How many junior consultants or apprentices can you hire for that?
Say 8?
Would you rather rent one external SI consultant or have 8 of your own people armed with a killer AI solution like S4SensAI, so each person has their own personal Agentic colleague?
If you Deshore, that's what you can have.
Way above average.