Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to meet their original business case goals fully, and as many as 25% will fail catastrophically (Gartner ERP Research). The software keeps getting better. The tools keep getting better. Implementation Methods and consulting approaches keep getting better. Yet, the failure rate stays the same. Something strange is going on.
There are several reasons why this statistic stubbornly remains. One of them that we would like to touch on today is Executive Support.
Most ERP projects get executive sponsorship on paper. A CEO announces the initiative. The board approves a budget. A steering committee is formed. Motivating speeches underscore the importance of the project, but then the executives return to their regular responsibilities, and the project is handed off to a mid-level team, with 20% of their time allocated to a program that touches every function in the company.
This is not a new observation, but it remains the single most predictive factor in whether an ERP project succeeds or fails. According to Gartner, the lack of executive team commitment and the lack of understanding of the organizational change needed are among the most common reasons implementations fail. 75% of ERP strategies are not strongly aligned or supported with the overall business strategy. The pattern repeats: inadequate change management, poor internal staffing, and executives who treat the ERP transformation as a technical exercise rather than a business exercise. .
The case studies are well documented. CIO has catalogued 18 major ERP failures spanning three decades, and the causes are remarkably consistent. One company spent seven years and €500 million on an SAP S/4HANA implementation before abandoning it entirely, driven by executive turnover and a hands-off approach to the integrator. Another botched go-live caused $64 million in unfulfilled orders and a 6.9% stock price drop. Another ballooned from 52 million to an estimated 174 million, with a Grant Thornton audit pointing directly to inadequate project governance, poor design choices, and a shortage of in-house expertise. In every case, the post-mortems pointed to governance failures and inadequate interaction with senior management.
Why 2026 Is the Pressure Point
SAP mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 (EHP 6-8) ends December 31, 2027. Extended maintenance runs to 2030, but at a two-percentage-point cost premium and with no access to platform improvements. For organizations still running ECC, the migration window is already compressed. A typical S/4HANA implementation for a mid-to-large enterprise takes 12 to 18 months for the core build alone. Factor in planning, budgeting, data preparation, and change management, and the realistic timeline often stretches beyond that.
Organizations that start now are already working against a tight timeline.
The talent market makes this worse. As SAPinsider has reported, fewer than half of organizations running SAP Business Suite core applications have even licensed S/4HANA, let alone completed a deployment. As the deadline approaches, competition for experienced SAP consultants intensifies, and implementation costs rise. The organizations that planned early get the experienced teams. The ones that wait get whoever is available.
What Misalignment Actually Looks Like
Executive misalignment is not always obvious. It rarely looks like open resistance. More often, it looks like a CFO who approved the budget but has not been involved in creating the project charter and plans. A COO who delegates process design decisions to the integrator. A CIO who frames the migration in technical terms rather than as an operational change that will affect how every department works. And commonly a combination of the above. The consequences of this hands-off approach tend to surface at the worst possible moment: after commitments are locked and the system finally appears. This pattern is detailed in Why SAP Transformation Programs Discover Problems Too Late.
There is also a structural misalignment that gets less attention: the incentive problem between buyers and implementers. The software vendor gets paid on license revenue. The systems integrator gets paid on billable hours. There is no built-in financial reason to push for a fast, clean implementation as one industry analyst observed. Executives who do not understand this dynamic approve terms that reward complexity and penalize speed.
How to Fix It Before It Breaks
Fixing executive misalignment is not about adding more steering committee meetings. It is about changing when and how leadership engages with the project. They need to be involved and a part of the project. This sometimes sounds impossible, given the competing demands on their time. So it is important to make it easy for Executives to have transparency, visualize the future, and make it possible for them to participate.
Executives need to see the system working early with their real data and configuration before they commit to a full implementation, not after. They need to be involved in process design, not just vendor selection. And the project needs a structure that surfaces problems early, when executives can still do something about them and are cheap to fix, rather than late, when they are expensive and politically difficult.
This is the principle behind what we do at LeapGreat. Our team has been implementing SAP ERP systems for over three decades, going back to R/1, and we authored the SAP Best Practices Manufacturing Baseline. We built our SaaS platform to do something the traditional model does not allow: put a fully working SAP S/4HANA system, configured with your actual business data, in front of your leadership team within one week of receiving your requirements. A running, integrated, documented system that your people can evaluate before you sign a full implementation contract.
That early visibility changes the dynamic. Executives stay engaged because they can see something real, not a slide deck or a Gantt chart. Process owners flag gaps before they become embedded in the build. And because the platform automates the system build and refinement cycles, the total implementation runs in roughly half the time of a traditional approach. Fewer months on the calendar mean less opportunity for the slow drift of attention and priorities that kills most ERP projects.
ERP failure is sometimes a leadership problem disguised as a technology issue. The organizations that will get through the 2027 deadline cleanly are the ones whose executives are engaged now, as active participants in how the system is designed, tested, and rolled out.
If your leadership team has been putting off the S/4HANA conversation, or if you have started the process and it is not going the way you expected, there is a faster path available.
See your working system in one week. Schedule a live demo with us today.
