The real cost of a failed migration
When a migration budget gets discussed, dedicated expertise is the first line people try to trim. It looks expensive, abstract, hard to justify next to more tangible costs. That’s exactly the wrong calculation, and recent history proves it again and again.
Migration expertise isn’t an expense. It’s insurance. And its cost is trivial next to what it prevents.
Gifi: ~€117 million, with the State at the table
The Gifi case is the most telling, because it’s recent and French. A poorly controlled ERP migration triggered a roughly 9% drop in revenue at a company worth €1.3 billion — close to €117 million in lost sales. The scale forced the group to call in the CIRI, France’s interministerial committee for industrial restructuring. A data migration ended up summoning the State to the table.
And it isn’t an exception
Gifi isn’t an isolated accident. It’s a pattern that repeats, sector after sector:
- Revlon (2018): a switch to S/4HANA left the company unable to fulfill $64 million in orders. The result: shortages, a stock drop, and a class action brought by its own shareholders;
- Nike (2001): a supply chain project with i2 caused $100 million in direct losses, and close to $400 million in total impact over the year;
- Hershey’s (1999): a rushed go-live right before Halloween missed over $100 million in orders and cut quarterly revenue by 12%;
- Haribo (2018): a poorly prepared S/4HANA migration caused shelf shortages and a 25% drop in sales of its signature gummy bears;
- US Navy: according to the GAO, nearly one billion dollars sunk into four incompatible ERP pilots, all abandoned.
None of these organizations lacked resources. They lacked control over their data and their execution.
The math fits on one line
Serious migration expertise runs between €200,000 and €1 million. Set that against Gifi’s €117 million: expertise, even at its highest, is less than 1% of the cost of a fiasco. That’s the ratio of an insurance premium, not a discretionary expense.
And like any insurance, its value never shows when things go well. It shows the day it keeps you off the list above.
What you actually pay for
Refusing the expertise doesn’t remove the risk. It moves it — from the quote to Go-Live, from the controllable to the endured, from a few hundred thousand euros to a few tens of millions.
The migration will happen either way. The only variable is whether you pay the entry price, or the exit bill.