Ask what an in-house SAP team costs and most people quote salaries. That's the smallest part of the bill. The bigger costs never reach the payroll report: the nights nobody covers, the months it takes to hire, and everything that walks out the door when a consultant leaves. Add those up and, for most mid-size companies, outsourcing comes out cheaper. There are exceptions, and we'll get to them.
One consultant isn't a team
Think about what a typical company runs on SAP. Finance lives in FI/CO. Sales and purchasing live in SD and MM. Someone has to look after the system itself, and someone has to fix the custom code when it breaks. A good consultant covers two of those areas well. So the "SAP person" you plan to hire is really three or four people.
Then there's the clock. Problems don't keep office hours. The month-end close runs late, a warehouse abroad starts its shift, an interface fails at 2 am. Covering one seat around the clock takes more than four people on 40-hour weeks, before anyone goes on holiday. Most internal teams don't try. They cover business hours and hope the night stays quiet.
None of these people come cheap. An experienced SAP consultant costs around $72,000 a year in Germany and about $50,000 in Romania, based on Qubit Labs' 2026 salary guide. That's before taxes, training and certifications.
Hiring is slow, and leaving is expensive
Say you hire anyway. Specialised SAP roles in Europe often stay open for more than three months. The tickets don't wait, so someone already on the team picks them up, and the project they were working on stalls.
A year or two later, your new hire gets a better offer. Gallup puts the cost of replacing an employee at between half and twice their annual salary. With SAP, the bigger loss is what they knew: why that custom pricing routine exists, which interface breaks at month-end, who in finance to call when it does. Most of it was never written down.
That's why the partner you pick matters as much as the decision to outsource. A provider that churns through consultants hands you the same problem, plus an invoice. Sync, an independently owned, founder-led SAP and Microsoft 365 partner based in Bucharest and Brașov, keeps team turnover under 5%, and its average client has stayed for more than ten years. What the team learns about your environment stays with the team, even when its members change.
2027 makes the choice harder to put off
SAP ends mainstream support for ECC at the end of 2027. You can stretch it to 2030, but extended maintenance costs more. Either way, most companies still on ECC have a migration ahead of them.
For an internal team, that creates a clash. The people who should plan the migration are the same people keeping today's system running. A team of four can't do both well. The migration usually slips, until the deadline is close enough that you're choosing a partner in a hurry, with little room to negotiate.
When keeping it in-house makes sense
Outsourcing isn't always the right answer. Keep SAP support in-house if your custom code is part of what sets your business apart. Keep it if you already have a large, stable team with good documentation. And keep it if regulators make outside access a headache, or if your processes change every week and need someone sitting next to the business.
Plenty of companies settle in the middle. A small internal team owns the roadmap and the relationship with the business. A partner handles the daily tickets, the night shift and the specialist modules. The internal team stays small enough to hold on to, and the partner carries the hiring risk.
What to ask a provider
Every provider promises a 99% SLA, so that number tells you very little. These questions tell you more:
- How many fixed tickets come back?
- How long until a problem is fixed, start to finish?
- What happens to what you know about our system when someone on your team leaves?
- How long do your clients stay?
- What do the first three months look like, week by week?
For a reference point, Sync resolves 80% of tickets within two days, and only 1.5% of closed tickets get reopened. Whoever you talk to, ask for numbers like these and compare.
Doing the maths
Put both options side by side over three years. On the in-house side, count every salary you'd need with employer costs, recruiting fees, training, and at least one replacement hire a year. On the outsourced side, count the fee, the transition and one person inside to manage the partner.
Then add the line most companies forget: the hours your current team spends on tickets instead of projects. That number usually surprises the CFO.
A quick example. Five SAP consultants in Romania cost about $250,000 a year in salaries. The same team in Germany costs around $360,000. One resignation adds $25,000 or more. And that team still goes home at 6 pm.
Sync's founders sit in the first meeting with every new client and run this comparison on the client's real ticket numbers. Most of that conversation is about the hours your team gets back. If you want to see how yours compare, book a call with the founders.
