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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Electric Vehicles have a faster 0-60 time than petrol or diesel cars.
0-60 is a measure of acceleration - the change in velocity over time.
To accelerate you need power, torque, grip and gearing.
You also need to shed weight.
Electric vehicles have powerful and torquey motors. But they’re heavy as a result of the huge batteries they carry. So why do they accelerate so quickly?
Put simply, they don’t have gears.
The gear change is the killer of the 0-60 time.
As a geeky teenager, I was either poring over computer magazines or car magazines. I knew the top speed, engine size, BHP and 0-60 time of pretty much every car in the tables at the back of What Car? Magazine.
I’d be mesmerised by the 7.2 seconds a Volvo 740 Turbo could hit 60 in, a bulky family saloon was faster than a Jaguar. I’d compare Ferraris and Lamborghinis with Renault 5 Turbos and notice how close they were but with vastly different price points. I’d wonder how cars with the same engine size and BHP could be 1.5 seconds apart on their 0-60 times.
Then, one day, in one of the magazines there was a test between 3 sports cars showing a table of the top speed in each gear. It suddenly dawned on me that the fastest accelerating cars on the 0-60 tests were the ones that could hit 60 in second gear.
Some were crippled by the need to change up to 3rd at 57 to get that last few MPH, losing a vital half second on the manual shift and de-clutch.
I’m lucky enough today to have a couple of Porsche 911s, one manual and Air Cooled (0-60 in 5.6 seconds) and one with a Doppelgänger 8 speed auto (0.60 in 4.5 seconds). 30 years of evolution and just 1.1 seconds apart.
One feels lively. The other feels like a time machine.
The lively one can touch 75 in second gear (although I shudder at the cost of an engine rebuild so tend to be in 4th by then). The time machine, I have no idea what gear it’s in at 60, and I don’t notice because the double clutch automatic keeps powering on through the gear changes while I grip the steering wheel with two white knuckled hands.
But EVs, no gearbox.
No lag or latency on the 0-60 sprint.
No matter how fast you do things, it’s the lag between things that hampers progress.
If you write an email in 3 minutes but it takes your boss 3 days to approve it, your 3 minutes is meaningless. Granted, if you’d taken 3 days and she takes 3 days to approve it, that’s worse. But your hard work and speed can often be undone by the gear-change-like lag of the next step in the process.
When you think of this with linear tasks, it’s simple to appreciate. But when you consider a complex project involving 100 people and thousands of interdependent tasks, say an S/4HANA migration, then the speed and lag problem becomes crippling.
"SAP Projects have inbuilt latency - a kind of Brownian motion that turns direct travel into circuitous meandering inter-continental train journeys."
Everything starts to move at the pace of the slowest component. Uncertainty and indecision act like long, slow gear changes with engines spinning at an RPM of $1,000 per minute until the drivetrain re-engages.
On big SAP projects, we call this “Run rate”.
This project has a Run rate of $1.5m per month.
If the project is delayed by a month, the run rate becomes the cost of delay. And, let’s face it, SAP projects never slip by a month. At scale, it takes 3 weeks to replan an SAP project, meaning the cost overrun is often 3 x Run Rate for an inevitable 3-month slippage.
70% of SAP projects run over time and over budget.
There's a 70% of chance of a 3 x Run Rate. There's your minimum contingency.
Then, there’s another thing.
Most of your consultants are paid on Time and Materials.
The thing they’re most interested in, money, is multiples by the number of days they work on your SAP project. Contractors in particular love a delay or an extension. Savvy Systems Integrators will offer fixed price on certain scope but ultimately find time-oriented ways (they call these things change orders) to justify more days.
The incentive to accelerate isn’t one that resonates with the people providing your advice.
The gear change lag techniques are pretty well honed too. Options papers, decision papers, sucking air between teeth on “complex” subjects like security, non-functional requirements, integration patterns, data models and robust governance.
I’m not saying that these things aren’t important.
But they are well polished anchors that contractors and consultants often throw out of the ship that create lag.
Principle 4 of Deshoring: Acceleration over Time Lag.
You really need to hurry up.
If you’re going to significantly reduce the amount your SAP project costs, you need to find ways to accelerate the tasks that take the longest, and shorten the gear-changes between stages and parties. The latter is about clarity and ensuring that there’s a more level playing field of knowledge across your team (this relates to Principle 1 too).
Deshoring means taking humans out of the high effort tasks and replacing them with sophisticated Agentic AI. Tasks like test scripts, test data, standard operating procedures, they can all be massively accelerated. S4SensAI does this stuff out-of-the-box, converting huge effort and relatively high skilled work from days per task to minutes per task.
But even more complex tasks like Custom Code analysis and Fit-to-Standard Analysis, things that are so labour intensive that some SAP customers don’t know where to start with them, can be done completely autonomously.
S4SenSAI and ABAPBanZAI together can complete autonomous Fit-to-Standard across thousands of custom SAP programmes in a few weeks. A team of 10 consultants on $1,500 per Day might take 6-9 months, say $2.5m.
With Deshoring, you don’t just reduce that cost by 80%.
No, you also eradicate the lag of one of the longest lead time (and highest skilled) tasks on an ECC to S/4HANA migration. This is 0-60 in 2 seconds vs. Horse & Cart performance that might never even get to 60, because a horse ain’t run that fast.
And 10 horses don’t make that carriage go 10x faster.
When we conducted our Deshoring research in early 2026, we identified 180+ SAP project tasks that can be done more quickly using advanced Agentic AI like S4SensAI.
We zoned in on the ones that can be accelerated the most, and the ones that required the highest (and most expensive) skills. We figured that they would be the sweet spot, the most compressible expensive tasks that require the most human effort.
We called this The Fold, the extent to which it is possible to reduce time and cost.
The scenario I outline above, custom SAP code analysis and fit-to-standard / re-spec clean core replacements, is the single biggest fold opportunity for customers moving from ECC to S/4HANA, or those moving to a clean(er) core once they've migrated.
Ask your SI to quote on a fit-to-standard analysis on your custom code. Once you have their quote, send it to me and I’ll give you the tools to do it yourself for less than the cost of one of those Lamborghinis I mentioned earlier.