Navigating Multi-Vendor Landscapes in SAP Projects

Most enterprise-scale SAP programs today involve a range of service providers, each bringing their own specialism. These may include global system integrators, boutique domain experts, hyperscaler infrastructure partners, and independent SAP consultants. 

Working with multiple vendors has clear advantages, but also introduces a level of complexity that must be anticipated and thoughtfully managed.

This article from IgniteSAP explores the dynamics of multi-vendor SAP environments in practice. It is for SAP professionals who are required to deliver results in increasingly complex setups, where collaboration across organizations, toolsets, and delivery cultures is part of everyday life. What follows is a look at how to navigate the challenges, avoid common pitfalls, and support clients or teams through successful delivery.

Foundation Planning and Pre-Project Design

Before a project begins, decisions made around structure and preparation define everything that follows.

Clients often focus on selecting the right mix of vendors based on technical criteria, but overlook their own readiness to coordinate the landscape they’re about to construct. Questions such as "Do we have the architectural leadership to guide multiple partners?" or "Have we defined a single source of process truth?" need answers upfront.

Internal teams need to think not just about who will do the work, but who will guide and integrate the different layers.

One of the first decisions is whether to appoint a lead integrator: this could be an internal function such as a Centre of Excellence or an external delivery partner with end-to-end oversight. Without this role clearly defined, decisions around data models, integration responsibilities, and issue resolution often stall or drift into ambiguity.

Risk planning also becomes more complicated. In single-vendor setups, the risk is centralized, but in multi-vendor landscapes, risk is distributed and often shared. That makes pre-project risk assessment valuable. Risk workshops can help identify gaps in coverage, such as interfaces nobody owns or dependencies without a clear delivery timeline.

The way vendor packages are scoped should also be reviewed carefully. Too much fragmentation (splitting a single process across multiple vendors) tends to generate rework and finger-pointing. It’s usually better to assign workstream ownership with process completeness in mind, even if that means sacrificing some apparent efficiency.

Strategic Foundations

Projects involving multiple vendors require governance that can cope with variation in ways of working, differing priorities, and conflicting interpretations of scope. That’s why the selection of a delivery model should be based on the client’s operating model, industry requirements, and internal delivery capability.

A federated model for project governance works well when the client has a mature CoE and clear standards. In less structured environments, a prime vendor model may work better, but it often leads to dependency on a single party, which can stifle innovation. Service Integration and Management (SIAM) models are used to address these gaps. SIAM separates the role of service delivery from service integration. It allows clients to bring in the best vendors while retaining oversight through a dedicated integration function.

Another important factor is project culture. This may sound vague, but it plays out in the everyday decisions that shape delivery. If one vendor uses Agile, another follows a waterfall model, and a third insists on their own ticketing system, collaboration grinds to a halt.

Agreement on a shared set of principles, including project cadence, communication structure, tooling, and documentation standards, is a foundation that often gets missed during mobilization. Without it, conflicts arise because teams are playing by different rules.

Operational Excellence

Once work is underway, success depends on keeping everything moving without losing coherence. This means defining how teams will work together on a day-to-day basis and what happens when things don’t go to plan. It’s easy to assume this falls under the role of the PMO, but in multi-vendor setups, that office needs to take on broader responsibilities: not just reporting and planning, but orchestration and facilitation.

One of the biggest challenges is setting clear expectations across vendor lines. This starts with onboarding. A good onboarding program introduces roles, escalation paths, tools in use, and most importantly, the ways in which vendors are expected to collaborate.

Routines also matter. Joint backlog reviews, shared sprint demos, and cross-vendor defect triages help keep communication fluid and surface small problems before they become delivery blockers. Regular check-ins are particularly important when vendors operate from different geographies or time zones. Tools like MS Teams, and Jira can support this, but only if they’re used consistently. Fragmented tooling leads to duplicated effort, missed updates, and growing mistrust between teams.

Another issue is performance tracking. In multi-vendor settings, clients often struggle to tell whether a missed milestone is the fault of a vendor, a dependency, or the client themselves. Shared KPIs should include delivery metrics, but also collaboration behaviors: responsiveness, participation in governance, and quality of documentation. Scorecards that reflect both hard outcomes and soft contributions tend to drive the right behaviors and help identify vendors who are team players.

Technical Integration and Innovation Enablement

Interface ownership should be clearly mapped and documented during the design phase. When no one clearly owns an interface, every issue turns into a blame game.

The use of SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) has grown partly because it offers a consistent environment for APIs, workflows, and event-driven messaging. When each vendor builds in isolation, you get duplication, performance issues, and friction during deployment. But when teams are asked to co-develop services, share components, and follow standard naming conventions, the platform becomes a genuine enabler.

Transport management and release planning are another pressure point. Multi-vendor projects often involve parallel development streams with overlapping cutovers. Without centralized coordination, changes collide, dependencies are missed, and rollbacks become frequent. This is one area where internal teams must lead. Ownership of the overall delivery calendar (including development freezes, release gates, and test cycles)must sit with a single authority who can arbitrate across all vendors.

Data Management and Governance

Data is the thread that connects systems, processes, and business decisions. In multi-vendor environments, it risks becoming frayed unless there is a shared commitment to maintaining consistency. The challenge isn’t just knowing who maintains the master data, but also who has authority over how it’s used, validated, and interpreted across systems managed by different vendors.

SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) tools can support this work, but what matters most is how governance is embedded into delivery routines. For example, vendors responsible for different modules may each define their own approach to handling customer data, but if those definitions don’t agree, integration issues are inevitable. Discrepancies don’t show up in design workshops, appear months later during data migration or testing.

Clear data ownership must therefore be paired with data architecture maps that are agreed with all vendors. It helps if clients define canonical models early and document which source systems or teams act as the ‘golden record’ for each data domain. The more distributed the vendor landscape, the more valuable this becomes.

Data quality issues also require collaboration. It’s not enough to have a clean file before go-live. Vendors need to agree how quality is monitored and reported after go-live, so problems are caught and resolved rather than passed along.

When multiple vendors are involved in a project, privacy and compliance become real project risks. Different providers may be governed by different regional regulations, or may operate under subcontracting agreements that are not fully disclosed. This matters, especially in regulated industries. Clients need to audit what data is being accessed, but also by whom, and from where. And if this isn’t addressed until the final test cycles, retrofitting data controls becomes expensive and frustrating.

Knowledge, IP, and Change Continuity

One of the most under-appreciated challenges is knowledge continuity. When teams are made up of rotating consultants from multiple firms, it’s surprisingly easy for important knowledge to disappear. Decisions made during blueprinting don’t make it into solution documentation. Changes made during UAT get lost between tickets. The original rationale for a technical choice vanishes when a developer moves on.

In practice, poor knowledge transfer leads to higher support costs, rework, and resistance to change. To deal with this, organizations should treat knowledge as an asset that needs to be managed carefully. This includes onboarding guides, configuration logs, decision registers, and a shared repository for interface specifications. These don’t need to be formal documents: what matters is that they’re accessible, kept up to date, and expected as part of vendor deliverables.

Ownership of intellectual property (IP) is another area that’s often left vague. If one vendor builds a set of reusable services or extensions on SAP BTP, does the client own that work? Are other vendors allowed to build on it? Can the vendor re-use that code elsewhere? Without clarity in contracts, these questions create tension later on. The best practice is for clients to retain IP ownership and host it in their own repositories, with access granted based on project roles, not vendor affiliation.

Handover procedures also deserve more attention. When vendors are replaced, ramped down, or reallocated, it’s essential that continuity is planned. A structured transition plan, with joint sessions, and walkthroughs can prevent weeks of disruption.

Industry-Specific and Sectoral Considerations

No two industries run SAP the same way. A retail company with global store rollouts will face different delivery pressures than a public sector agency with fixed annual budgets and strict audit requirements. In multi-vendor landscapes, these sectoral differences become even more significant, because each vendor brings assumptions about what “normal” is, and those assumptions often conflict.

In regulated sectors like pharmaceuticals or banking, documentation, ability to audit, and traceability are mandated. Vendors must understand validation requirements and work within them, even if it slows their preferred development cadence. This can frustrate delivery teams who are used to moving fast, but skipping these controls exposes clients to legal risk, as well as risks to their reputation. Project leads must communicate what is required, and why.

Other sectors require different vendor coordination. In manufacturing, for example, SAP systems must often interface with operational technology such as PLCs or MES platforms. These are usually managed by separate vendors or even in-house engineering teams. If integration isn’t carefully planned, it introduces gaps that are hard to close later: especially when real-time data and process control are involved. These situations benefit from a delivery lead who understands both enterprise IT and specific shopfloor requirements, which isn’t always easy to find.

Multinational companies face a further layer of complexity. Delivery teams often need to coordinate across languages, regulatory regimes, and infrastructure constraints. Local vendors may be needed for tax and compliance configuration, while global vendors manage the core template. Coordinating between the two groups takes effort, especially when timelines or legal constraints differ by country.

Cloud, Hybrid, and On-Premise Complexity

As SAP landscapes move toward modular, cloud-based architectures, vendor ecosystems are becoming more fragmented. One vendor may manage the core ERP system hosted in a hyperscaler cloud, another may build BTP extensions, while a third runs on-premise integration layers or legacy components. The result is a technically viable, but organizationally complex ecosystem.

If performance drops in an integrated scenario involving cloud-hosted and on-premise systems, which vendor is expected to investigate first? Without an agreed approach to monitoring, the client ends up chasing logs and reports from multiple sources. Tools like SAP Cloud ALM or SAP Focused Run can help, but only when they are used consistently and when access is shared across vendors.

SLAs also become harder to manage. Each vendor may deliver good performance on their own terms, but that doesn’t guarantee a positive experience for the business. What matters to the end user is process performance. SLA frameworks should be designed around business outcomes, not just technical metrics, and why cross-vendor dependencies must be defined explicitly in contracts and dashboards.

The introduction of RISE with SAP has added another layer to the discussion. While RISE simplifies infrastructure and licensing for clients, it also changes the role of SAP itself within the delivery model. In RISE projects, some integration points that used to be managed by vendors are now handled directly by SAP or its hyperscaler partners. This requires a shift in expectations. Vendors need to understand where their responsibility stops and SAP’s begins. Clients need to plan for this by including SAP’s delivery teams in early design and governance forums.

Talent, Skills, and Organzational Capability

The skills needed to manage a multi-vendor SAP project go beyond technical expertise. Strong coordination, clarity in communication, and familiarity with cross-functional delivery models are all essential. Internal teams often focus on hiring for depth—deep ABAP knowledge, or specific module experience—but in multi-vendor environments, breadth matters just as much.

Roles like vendor manager, SAP integration architect, and project controller take on much more weight when multiple service providers are involved. These individuals need to connect technical decisions with delivery impact, resolve disputes diplomatically, and hold vendors accountable without creating hostility. Investing in their development is not optional.

Cross-training helps too. When functional consultants understand the integration model, or when developers understand data governance, it reduces dependency on any one vendor or person. Training should also include tool familiarization if the team doesn’t know how to use Jira, or SAP Cloud ALM, they’ll end up relying on vendors to tell them what’s happening.

Future Outlook and Strategic Recommendations

Vendor landscapes will likely become even more complex. As SAP expands its AI capabilities and promotes modular deployments through the Business Technology Platform and industry cloud solutions, the number of external contributors to a single SAP program is likely to grow. This means that clients and internal SAP professionals will need to rethink their roles. Instead of owning all the delivery, they must focus on orchestration.

When managed well, multi-vendor SAP landscapes allow companies to move faster, adopt new innovations sooner, and build more resilient systems. But this only happens when governance is strong, communication is deliberate, and technical architecture is treated as a shared language rather than a vendor-specific asset.

The best SAP professionals in these environments are those who think beyond their module, beyond their vendor, and beyond their delivery window. They understand that every interface has two owners, and very milestone is connected to another.

If you are an SAP professional looking for a new role in the SAP ecosystem our team of dedicated recruitment consultants can match you with your ideal employer and negotiate a competitive compensation package for your extremely valuable skills, so join our exclusive community at IgniteSAP .