In procurement, the hurdle is no longer the budget but the implementation

What happened

In an SAP News Center article from 17 September 2026, SAP looks back on five years of the Economist Enterprise research series it sponsors – the current edition surveyed 2,648 executives across 23 countries – and names as the most striking shift that in 2022, 30.2 percent still saw budget as the biggest barrier to digital transformation in procurement, whereas in 2026 ease of implementation tops the list for 71.7 percent.

Who is affected

If you are responsible for an S/4HANA programme in a large enterprise where procurement – with SAP MM, Ariba or both – is one building block among many, the study describes a pattern you probably recognise from your own steering committee: the money is approved, and things still stall. So this concerns the programme leadership and the CFO office more than the procurement function itself, because the question “Can we afford it?” has been answered, and success now hinges on the question “Can we get it into our processes, data and organisation?” A second finding fits the picture: confidence that procurement helps shape digital transformation fell from 91 to 68 percent within a year – the business side is better involved than it used to be, but visibility is not yet influence.

What to do

Anyone planning a procurement implementation, or in the middle of one, should treat ease of implementation as a factor in its own right rather than a leftover item behind licences and implementation effort. In concrete terms: before you start, take an honest look at how clean supplier and material master data really are, which approval and ordering processes should run the same way across countries and which deliberately should not, and who on the business side has the time to make decisions when the programme needs them. And in the business case, tie the benefit to processes that actually run differently after go-live – not to the availability of a feature.

Our assessment

The figures come from a survey sponsored by SAP – so we read the five-year comparison as a direction, not as an exact shift. We do think the direction is right, though, because it matches what we know from large SAP programmes: an implementation rarely fails because a feature is missing or the budget runs out, but because the business, IT and the implementation partner hold different ideas of what “done” means. The implementation partner can only implement what the business has decided, and the business can only decide what is presented to it in an understandable way – that translation between the two is, in our view, what “ease of implementation” means in practice. Whoever equips it with time and experienced people inside the programme, instead of expecting everyone to handle it on the side, holds the biggest lever for turning approved money into a running process.