Change Management Is the Most Underfunded Part of Every SAP Migration

they'd do differently, say the people side of the project accounts for 36% of what they would change. Prosci's research goes further and puts a number on the gap: human factors matter roughly six times more than technical factors in determining whether an ERP program actually realizes its intended benefits.

That gap isn't a training-budget footnote. It's a structural mismatch between where the risk actually sits and where the money goes. And it's a big part of why so many technically successful go-lives (the system works, the data migrated, the integrations hold) still fail to deliver the productivity and adoption the business case assumed.

Traditional ERP training follows a fixed sequence: classroom or e-learning sessions before go-live, a set of static job aids, and a help desk queue after go-live for whatever the training didn't cover. When the change management budget is already a fraction of what the technology workstream gets, that sequence tends to get compressed further under deadline pressure, and the compression usually falls on the parts hardest to see from a project plan: refresher sessions, role-specific job aids, and contextual support during the weeks after cutover, when the change is heaviest. Employees who get one training pass weeks before go-live often meet the actual system for the first time on the day they're expected to be productive in it.

Some organizations are using AI copilots and in-app assistants, including SAP's Joule and comparable tools, to put a fraction of that support back without adding headcount, answering routine how-do-I questions in the moment instead of routing them to a training team or help desk that's already stretched thin. It's a genuine efficiency gain and a reasonable way to make a thin training budget cover more ground. It doesn't change the underlying math, though. A program that starts from a change-management allocation in the single digits is still starting from that allocation, whatever tools it deploys inside it.