SAP SOAP, case 1
Death by Spreadsheet
A razor-sharp look inside SAP S/4HANA migration, where flawed tools and fast-tracked project thinking collide.
The case
The project looks calm from the outside. Inside, one spreadsheet claims to be the single version of truth, until too many pairs of hands pull it apart.
Alex inherits the chaos at the end of Realisation: user acceptance testing grinds to a halt because of bad data. The SAP ‘Migrate Your Data’ app aims to simplify loading. It is no substitute for a proper Extract-Transform-Load process or real data cleansing. By skipping it, the team turns governance into guesswork. Meet Alex →
It starts on a Tuesday, in week two of acceptance testing. In the boardroom, the business reports missing fields, wrong units and duplicates. The problem has already been escalated, and not by Alex.
One week. That is all Alex gets to expose the root cause and design a rescue plan before the go-live train leaves the station. Every error log is a clue. Every silence in a meeting is another lead.
Her ticket system shows a handful of minor issues. The boardroom describes a building on fire. Somewhere between the two sits the spreadsheet, and every team keeps its own copy.
SOAP in this case
Alex’s four words: Structured. Open. Aligned. Purified. They sound like a mindfulness app. They are survival tactics. What they mean →
Why SAP people read it
A data migration story. All product data extracted from the legacy system into one spreadsheet with countless worksheets with countless columns. Nobody owns it. Everybody trusts it. Nobody asks what happens when it’s wrong, until acceptance testing does it for them.
Every chapter ends with Alex’s Captain’s Log, a RAID entry: risks, actions, impacts, decisions. The kind you wish your own project kept. Each one closes with her current state of mind, starting at Bewildered. Honest status reporting, at last. Your steering committee would never allow it.
Death by Spreadsheet shows how ownership confusion and spreadsheet-driven fixes become the biggest risk in an SAP deployment. It is for project managers first, and for the leaders, data stewards and consultants who have watched templates and rush jobs undo months of good work. And for anyone who has fixed the same issue twice, argued with a file, or realised that the real system failure is human.
Every project has this spreadsheet. Yours probably does too.
Get the book
Death by Spreadsheet
A Detective Story of Governance, Grit, and the SAP ‘Migrate Your Data’ App.
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Book 1 in the SAP SOAP series. Reads on its own.
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Published 4 November 2025 by No Tie Generation.
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Paperback, 107 pages. ISBN 978-1-9193089-1-3.
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Kindle ebook. ISBN 978-1-9193089-0-6.
Short enough to finish before the next steering committee.