The Coming SAP Talent Crunch: Why Consultant Rates Are About to Spike

It isn't only about cost. A DSAG member survey — the German-speaking SAP user group, whose research is closely watched across the wider SAP ecosystem — found that 77% of respondents considered a lack of resources, whether employees or external consultants, to be “important” or “very important” as a constraint on their migration plans. That is a structural bottleneck, not a pricing inconvenience: even organizations with an open budget can find themselves unable to secure experienced staff on the timeline they need.

The skills gap is also a different shape than it was during the ECC era. Recruiters and delivery firms working this market describe experienced S/4HANA consultants needing fluency in areas that simply didn't exist when most ECC-era consultants built their careers: SAP's Business Technology Platform, Fiori interfaces, embedded analytics, and cloud integration patterns, layered on top of the traditional module depth in areas like finance, supply chain and materials management. That combination narrows the realistic candidate pool considerably — and the most experienced people in that narrower pool tend to already be committed to live programs elsewhere.