Procrastination, Quantified: Xmateria Puts a Number on SAP’s Favorite Bad Habit

Every SAP program has a task that everyone agrees is critical and nobody wants to start. It is data migration, and it waits, through blueprinting, through design, through build, until suddenly it is the thing standing between the program and go-live. London-based data migration specialist Xmateria decided to measure what all that waiting actually costs, and in mid-2026 published the answer as a first-of-its-kind research report titled The True Cost of Data Procrastination.

The headline finding, drawn from a survey of more than 100 SAP customers and experts conducted over six months: 57% of respondents said data migration regularly delays SAP projects. When timelines slip, projects are commonly overrun by 10 to 25% of projected time, and nearly a third are overrun by up to 50%. Recently, Xmateria’s Ben McGrail and Alexander Smith went live with the full findings, revealing what the firm calls the hidden patterns behind program delay: postponing hard data decisions consistently leads to longer timelines, higher costs, and reduced business value.

The Single Biggest Overlooked Risk Measure

Buried in the report is the finding with the most practical force. Drawing on the hands-on experience of its respondents, Xmateria concludes that early senior-level engagement with data is the single biggest risk-management measure available to most SAP programs, yet one of the most overlooked. The theme recurred consistently in the survey: data is fundamental to project success, yet it is routinely left too late. The firm, founded in 2021 and operating from London with a presence in Spain, has spent the year applying that thesis across the scenarios where data decisions bite hardest.

Xmateria has also tackled the “stay, move or modernize” decision facing SAP ECC customers. And in a running clip series, the company distilled the starting point for SAP S/4HANA migrations into one line: “the truth lies in the data,” because that data becomes the foundation for the business and technology decisions that follow.

A Finding the Benchmarks Corroborate

Xmateria’s numbers land on well-prepared ground. SAPinsider’s ERP Migration and Transformation 2026 benchmark found that only 34% of organizations report a complete SAP S/4HANA transition, even as 55% have deployed the platform in some form, a gap consistent with programs that stall in exactly the late phases where deferred data work surfaces. And with SAPinsider’s Technology Leader’s Strategic Agenda for 2026 showing 70% of technology leaders under efficiency and cost mandates, a 50% timeline overrun is no longer an embarrassment absorbed quietly. It is a board-level variance.

The deeper point in Xmateria’s framing is that data procrastination is not a technical failure. It is an organizational one: senior stakeholders treat data as a downstream detail, delegate it downward, and discover at cutover rehearsal that the hard decisions- what to migrate, what to archive, what to clean, and who owns quality- were never made. The fix costs almost nothing. It is a seat at the table, occupied early.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Put data on the steering committee agenda from day one, with a senior owner in place. Xmateria’s central finding, that early senior-level engagement with data is the biggest overlooked risk measure, translates directly: ERP program managers should appoint a data workstream lead with steering committee standing at program initiation, and require data decisions, scope, quality thresholds, and archiving rules to be logged like design decisions.

Budget for the overrun you are statistically likely to have, or spend to avoid it. With 57% of projects regularly delayed by data migration and a third overrunning by up to 50%, program sponsors planning S/4HANA moves should stress-test business cases against those figures, then compare the cost of early data profiling and cleansing against the cost of the modeled delay. The arithmetic usually settles the argument.

In carve-outs, defend scope like the TSA clock is the whole game, because it is. Xmateria’s carve-out guidance warns sellers against absorbing buyer-led transformation when the TSA date is fixed. M&A-facing SAP teams should define the technical carve-out boundary contractually, route buyer enhancement requests to post-close phases, and keep the data separation plan ruthlessly minimal until the deadline is safe.