In SAP programs, global rollouts represent one of the toughest tests of strategy, coordination, and execution. Bob Cummings, CEO of LeapGreat and an SAP veteran with over 35 years of experience, puts it bluntly:
“A global rollout is essentially when a customer is trying to roll out to many countries around the world or many subsidiaries or divisions.”
The leap from deploying SAP in one location to orchestrating it across 50 or 60 countries is massive. Cummings cautions against the common mistake of assuming a working pilot template can simply be copied to new regions. “Countries and the local businesses tend to be often quite different, even though at the surface they don’t look different,” he explains. The differences matter from legal requirements to subtle operational quirks, and ignoring them can derail even the best-planned initiatives.
Why Standard Approaches Struggle
As SAP explains, “An SAP rollout is the process of implementing a SAP system throughout several departments, sites, or business divisions…distributing an already-existing SAP template to other departments of the company”.
SAP offers structured rollout guidance: “Template Management…allows customers with multi-site SAP installations to efficiently manage their business processes across geographical distances…” (source).
Yet Cummings identifies a recurring flaw:
- Direct replication from headquarters fails to account for local demands.
- A theoretical template built in isolation misses critical realities of day-to-day operations.
- The successful route? Start with a center of expertise working with two pilot countries to build and stabilize the template before wider use.
As he puts it: “Your goal is to actually build the template and get two countries up live first before you declare anything a template.”
Enter Frontload™: Challenging the Sequential Rollout Model
Traditionally, global SAP rollouts follow a wave approach: wave one goes live, then wave two begins, and so on. This sequence often stretches into multi-year marathons. “If you do wave one and then wave two and wave three, you’re talking about several years,” says Cummings.
LeapGreat’s Frontload™ tackles this bottleneck. Its methodology allows for early system visualization and refinement, making it easier for future waves to prepare in parallel. The concept is simple, but the impact is huge.
“Using our tooling you can front load a system, which makes it very easy to visualize right in the beginning and do a refinement much more quickly of your system so you can implement faster,” Cummings explains.
Compressing Timelines and Reducing Risk
Frontload™ parallelization saves time and reduces risk. Projects expected to take 18 months have been trimmed to 11 or 12 months. In multi-year programs, entire years have been reclaimed. “We’ve seen very easily over a few years where a rollout was over five years or six years, and we can save two, we can pull two years out of that,” says Cummings.
But speed is only half the story. Frontload™ also shines by minimizing risk.
“It’s not just about speed and cost, it’s also these projects can go wrong. If you look in the internet and you Google ERP Risk, you’ll see a lot of frightening literature,” he warns. Early visibility and structured collaboration lower the odds of failure dramatically.
The Human Factor: Still the Hardest Part
Despite decades of ERP evolution, Cummings points out the sobering reality: “ERP is nothing new. It’s been around for half a century. And you’d think these projects would be much, much easier today.” Many organizations still repeat the same costly missteps of the past.
What makes the difference? People. Cummings advises leaders to reverse-engineer their rollout by focusing first on change management, training, and user adoption. “Let’s forget for a moment the technology. Let’s think about the change management and the people. The soft things are the hard things we say in these projects.”
The Bottom Line for SAP Professionals
LeapGreat’s mission is refreshingly pragmatic: remove the fear from SAP global rollouts. “We would like to remove that fear, bring back the excitement, and make it so that you can actually get back to focusing on value rather than focusing on survival in these projects,” Cummings concludes.
Frontload™ offers SAP experts a realistic and proven way to accelerate projects and dramatically reduce risk, delivering results that speak directly to what matters most: business value.
