The ROI Illusion: When SAP Works but the Business Doesn’t

I’ve spent more than two decades around digital transformation programs, long enough to see the same story repeat itself hundreds of times.

The banners go up. The dashboards go green. The system goes live.

And then, the next morning, nothing seems quite as fast as it should be.

Reports take longer. Approvals stall. Teams start building spreadsheets again.

Everyone looks at each other and wonders: Why aren’t we seeing the return we were promised?

That’s when the reality hits.

The system works exactly as designed.

The business doesn’t.

The ROI Illusion

Every major transformation project has an ROI story.

It’s the slide that wins the budget, the model that makes the investment case, the number the board remembers.

But those numbers are almost always based on assumptions that don’t survive contact with the real world.

They assume full adoption.

They assume everyone follows the new process perfectly from day one.

They assume time saved on paper will turn into value in practice.

That, right there, is the ROI illusion.

Because ROI isn’t created by configuration. It’s created by adoption.

A system can execute every transaction flawlessly and still fail to deliver efficiency if people don’t use it the way it was designed.

I’ve seen this play out in some of the largest enterprises in the world. The technology is sound, the data is clean, and the processes are elegant.

But somewhere between the screen and the person sitting in front of it, friction appears.

It’s the pause before someone clicks. The confusion over which path to follow. The local workaround that saves one user time but breaks the process for everyone else.

That’s where ROI quietly disappears – not in the code, but in the behaviour.

Where the Friction Lives

If you want to understand why ROI projections rarely match reality, start by looking at where friction hides.

It’s in the gaps between digital precision and human intuition.

It’s in the split-second decisions people make when the workflow doesn’t match how they actually work.

It’s in the grey area between system logic and organisational habit.

Most organisations never measure that.

They measure uptime, not outcomes.

They report transaction volumes, not time.

They count how many users log in, not how long it takes them to complete the task.

And when you don’t measure friction, you can’t manage it.

The result is an adoption gap, the difference between what the system can do and what people actually do.

It doesn’t look dramatic at first. A few seconds lost here, a few extra steps there.

But across thousands of employees and millions of transactions, those seconds add up to thousands of hours.

That’s the hidden cost that erodes every ROI story ever written.

Time: The Missing Metric

Time is the universal currency of efficiency.

Every ROI model ever built is, at its core, a time model in disguise.

We talk about cost reduction, productivity, or headcount efficiency, but all of those translate to time saved.

If ten thousand employees save just one hour per week, that’s 520,000 hours a year – roughly twenty-six million dollars of productive capacity at standard loaded cost.

Now ask yourself: who’s measuring that? Who’s validating whether that time was actually saved or simply moved around?

The uncomfortable truth is that most organisations don’t know.

They assume time savings because the project plan said so.

But no one goes back to check if the business really got faster.

That’s why I believe time should be the universal metric of efficiency – the baseline for every transformation performance review.

When you start measuring time, you begin to see what’s really happening inside your business.

You see where processes slow down, where handovers create delay, where digital precision meets human hesitation.

Time data exposes the gap between theoretical ROI and real-world performance.

And once you can see it, you can fix it.

The Adoption Operating Model

So how do you manage adoption as a measurable system?

The answer is what we call the Adoption Operating Model – a simple, continuous cycle that turns digital adoption from a one-off event into a managed performance discipline.

It runs like this:

1. Detect. Measure how people use the system. Track completion times, error rates, and patterns of rework.
2. Diagnose. Identify where friction occurs and why. Is it complexity, confusion, or configuration?
3. Discover. Find opportunities to simplify, automate, or guide the process more effectively.
4. Act. Make targeted improvements – small, fast, and measurable.
5. Verify. Quantify the time saved and turn it into a validated financial result.

When you run this loop continuously, adoption performance becomes as visible and governable as financial performance.

You can see where efficiency is rising, where it’s leaking, and where to intervene next.

It’s not theoretical.

I’ve watched organisations recover hundreds of thousands of hours this way.

Not by deploying new technology, but by finally managing the one thing they’d always ignored – how people actually use what they already have.

Seeing Adoption in Real Time

The biggest shift in the last few years has been the rise of analytics and AI that can track adoption behaviour in real time.

Instead of waiting for feedback, you can now see friction as it happens.

You can spot patterns: where users hesitate, where they abandon a process, where approval loops slow everything down.

And once you can see it, you can act.

Some organisations are even using AI to predict friction before it occurs – to identify which processes will struggle with adoption and which can be safely automated.

It’s a new kind of transparency.

And it changes the relationship between IT and the business completely.

Because now adoption isn’t a training problem. It’s a performance opportunity.

Turning Time into ROI

When you manage adoption in measurable time, ROI stops being an estimate and becomes a fact.

The formula is simple:

Monetised Time = Hours Returned × Loaded Labour Cost.

It’s not fancy. It’s just honest.

Every hour you give back to the business is real, quantifiable value.

And when you can show Finance exactly how that number was calculated, the conversation changes.

ROI becomes visible, auditable, and repeatable.

You’re no longer arguing over assumptions.

You’re showing results in the one language everyone understands – time.

The Payoff

When adoption is measured through time, three things happen.

Operational clarity.

You can see exactly where friction occurs and what it costs. That gives you control.

Financial credibility.

Finance can validate every gain. ROI moves from projection to proof.

Continuous improvement.

Each cycle of measurement and optimisation adds new value. Time savings compound, and efficiency becomes a self-sustaining system.

That’s when transformation becomes real.

The Mindset Shift

The biggest barrier to achieving this isn’t technology. It’s mindset.

Most enterprises still treat adoption as an afterthought.

They invest millions in implementation and almost nothing in managing how the system performs once it’s live.

It’s like building a Formula 1 car and never checking how the driver handles the corners.

But when you treat adoption as part of the operating model – when you measure how time flows through your processes – performance changes dramatically.

You go from wondering why ROI hasn’t materialised to proving exactly where it came from.

And once you start managing adoption in time, you never go back.

From ROI Promise to ROI Proof

For me, this is where the future of SAP value lies.

Not in modules deployed or dashboards configured, but in minutes returned to the business.

Because the system doesn’t create ROI – people do.

The job of leadership is to make sure those people have the time, clarity, and tools to use the system well.

When they do, efficiency becomes visible, measurable, and monetizable.

That’s what I mean by the Economics of Time – the discipline of turning adoption into value, and value into proof.

SAP’s ROI story doesn’t need to change.

We just need to measure the part that makes it real.

Where DAA Fits

Everything I’ve described here – measuring adoption in time, closing the gap between system performance and business performance, turning hours saved into validated ROI – is the work we do at Digital Adoption Advisor (DAA).

We help organisations build the systems and habits that make digital transformation measurable.

That means designing adoption operating models, integrating the analytics that make time visible, and working with Finance to validate the gains.

The goal is simple: to help every SAP customer move from ROI promised to ROI proven.

Because once you can measure time and prove what it’s worth, digital transformation stops being a one-off project and becomes a continuous source of performance.

That’s where transformation finally earns its keep – when every hour returned is an hour the business can invest back into growth.