By Vaidya Aiyer, VP of Enterprise AI · Published October 13, 2026
Previously in this series: The Most Expensive “Routine” Ticket I've Ever Seen →
Last week I asked a simple question. How long does a routine SAP ticket take to resolve at your company?
Not one person said under an hour.
27% said same day.
45% said one to three days.
27% said longer than three days.
These are routine tickets. A failed IDoc. A batch job that didn't finish. A sales order stuck on an error. Most of them take minutes to fix once the right person looks at them.
So what is the ticket doing for three days?
It's waiting for the experienced person who knows the fix, who is busy on something else. Or a junior person picked it up and is waiting on a senior one to confirm. Or it landed at 2 AM, and the person who can fix it is asleep.
When the right person is free and the ticket lands at a decent hour, it gets fixed fast. That rarely happens all at once.
The work is not the bottleneck. The waiting is.
And it's getting worse.
Experienced SAP people want project work. S/4 is where the interesting problems are. It's where careers grow. Support, especially overnight support, is the job nobody is lining up for. The people coming into SAP now don't want it either.
Nobody wants the 2 AM ticket.
I don't blame anyone for this. Fixing the same IDoc error for the fifth time this month is not why anyone got into SAP. Good people should be on the S/4 move, the process redesign, the hard problems. That's where their experience counts.
But someone still has to fix the routine stuff. And the business feels every hour it waits. Orders sit. Invoices don't post. Someone on the business side says “SAP support is slow.” Meanwhile the SLA report is green, because the ticket was picked up on time. Nobody measured the wait.
The usual answer is more people in the queue. More shifts. More handoffs. That doesn't fix waiting. It just adds more places to wait.
A conversation this week stuck with me. A large SAP customer wants routine failures fixed the moment they happen. A failed batch job, a stuck IDoc. No waiting for someone to pick it up. No waiting for the senior person to be free. Just fixed.
That's the right ask.
Routine tickets don't have a skills problem. They have a waiting problem.
So what if a routine ticket got fixed the moment it broke?
We've been working on this. More soon.