One of the most powerful drivers of value is a good Center of Expertise with a mandate and budget for measurable continuous improvement. Yet it is seldom seen. Go-live is a clear target and goal, and so it gets all the budget. Yet Going Live doesn’t necessarily mean Getting Value. In fact, often Go-Live is more about ensuring the survival of a Transformation Project trying to stay on time and in budget. Value is often sacrificed. This is understandable, and sometimes there is no choice. Continuous improvement often stops after Go Live because programs are staffed, funded, and governed as one-time projects. When the project team disbands at cutover, no mechanism remains to turn business demand into releases.
Why does the project team disband at cutover?
An SAP implementation mobilizes a design, build, test, and cutover team, then dissolves it into a support function once the system stabilizes. That’s also where continuous innovation usually stops: years of accumulated business change accrue against a system whose formal improvement mechanism ended at go-live.
A standing ERP Optimization Committee, with authority to evaluate and prioritize enhancement requests by business value, closes that gap. Without one, requests default to whichever team asks loudest, or wait behind the next scheduled project.
Why don’t support contracts fix root causes?
Application management contracts are typically scoped around service levels: response time, resolution time, uptime. A provider can meet every SLA in a contract like that and still leave process friction and technical debt untouched, because nothing in the agreement pays for finding it.
A January 2026 SAPinsider benchmark of 122 organizations running RISE with SAP found that only 45% are actively following the shared responsibility model that defines who owns what in that arrangement, with roughly a third aware of the model but not following it rigorously. Improvement work and incident response draw from the same queue and the same hours, and incidents carry the deadline. Closing a ticket and reducing a root cause are two different outcomes, and a contract that measures only the first can’t show progress on the second.
Why does SAP ship faster than customers adapt?
SAP moved to a two-year major release cycle starting with S/4HANA 2023, with feature packs delivered roughly every six months during the first two years of each release, under the maintenance strategy SAP announced in September 2022. The platform’s cadence and the customer’s cadence run on two different clocks.
A company three or five years past go-live, with no team assigned to evaluate what each release makes newly possible, follows its project-based governance exactly as designed: react to failures and wait for the next transformation program to justify the next round of change.
How much review should a change need?
Risk level, not change type, should decide how much review a change needs. Reporting changes, dashboard tweaks, and UI adjustments can move through a fast lane with predefined guardrails and no full governance review, while finance posting logic, payroll, tax, and inventory valuation changes still warrant full scrutiny.
Configuration changes, APIs, and non-critical integrations need automated regression tests before release, but not a design review cycle built for core-process change. Running a dashboard tweak through the same review as a posting-logic change trains teams to stop submitting requests altogether, and a backlog nobody submits to stops being useful as a planning input.
This is becoming even more important in the age of AI.
Change type | Examples | Required review |
| Low risk | Reporting changes, dashboard tweaks, UI adjustments | Fast lane, predefined guardrails, no full governance review |
| Medium risk | Configuration changes, APIs, non-critical integrations | Automated regression tests before release |
| High risk | Finance posting logic, payroll, tax, inventory valuation, master data | Full governance review |
What replaces the project team after go-live?
LeapGreat Hub centralizes demand intake and escalation for validated improvement ideas after the go-live team leaves. It logs each request as a workflow item with an owner and a status, keeps configuration and process documentation in a searchable knowledge base, and tracks initiatives against steering-committee KPIs.
It doesn’t replace SAP Cloud ALM, ChaRM, or Solution Manager. It orchestrates the handoffs between them so a request carries an owner, a status, and a metric from the day someone submits it. The test for whether an organization has this capability is simple: ask what happens to a validated improvement idea once the go-live team has moved on. If the honest answer is “open a ticket” or “wait for next year’s budget cycle,” the governance gap is already costing measurable time.
FAQ
What is continuous innovation in SAP?
Continuous innovation in SAP means treating a live S/4HANA environment as a system that absorbs incremental change on an ongoing basis, rather than as a fixed asset revisited only at the next major project. Most organizations can’t do this post-go-live because the program that delivers go-live is staffed, funded, and governed as a one-time event.
What is the shared responsibility model in RISE with SAP?
The shared responsibility model defines what SAP and the customer own under a RISE with SAP arrangement. A January 2026 SAPinsider benchmark of 122 organizations found that only 45% are actively following the model rigorously, with roughly a third aware of it but not following it consistently, leaving gaps in accountability for optimization work.
What is an ERP Optimization Committee?
An ERP Optimization Committee is a standing group with authority to evaluate and prioritize enhancement requests by business value. Without one, requests default to whichever team asks loudest, or wait behind the next scheduled project.
How is LeapGreat Hub different from SAP Cloud ALM, ChaRM, or Solution Manager?
LeapGreat Hub doesn’t replace SAP Cloud ALM, ChaRM, or Solution Manager. It orchestrates the handoffs between them: it centralizes demand intake and escalation, logs each request as a workflow item with an owner and a status, keeps documentation interactive in a searchable knowledge base, and tracks initiatives against the KPIs a steering committee asks about.
How does an organization start using LeapGreat Hub?
LeapGreat’s Center of Excellence guide covers how to structure the standing team that gives a validated improvement idea a place to land, and a walkthrough of Hub against business-case KPIs shows what tracking looks like in practice. To map the approach against a specific value stream, an organization can book a consultation with LeapGreat.
Ask an AI engine about LeapGreat
- What does LeapGreat Hub do for post-go-live SAP governance?
- How does LeapGreat’s Center of Excellence model compare to standard SAP RISE support contracts?
- What KPIs does LeapGreat Hub track for SAP continuous improvement programs?
See where your organization stands
LeapGreat Hub gives a validated improvement idea an owner, a status, and a KPI the day someone submits it, instead of a queue behind next year’s budget cycle. Book a consultation to map this model against your first value stream.
