Manufacturers — one of SAP’s most deeply invested customer bases — are faced with a widening gap between the innovation they need and what the vendor is offering. Those in this industry require AI intelligence and automation to ensure resilience and maintain competitive advantage. Rather than making these features readily and cost-effectively available, SAP promotes migrations to SAP Cloud ERP via RISE, which can do more to delay innovation and hinder agility than help.
This places manufacturers in a difficult position: Pursue a disruptive reimplementation project with an unclear ROI, or risk falling behind in the race to Industry 4.0 and beyond.
The reality is that the ECC or S/4HANA release they already have isn’t the problem — the operating model is. Manufacturers don’t need to rip and replace their existing, highly customized systems just to gain access to advanced capabilities. They can extend the life and value of their reliable, business-critical systems beyond SAP’s end-of-maintenance deadlines with third-party support for SAP and adopt an Agentic AI ERP model for enterprise-wide AI capabilities instead.
A new approach: Keep the SAP engine, change the suspension
Manufacturers run some of the most complex end-to-end business processes — including, but not limited to:
- Customer management
- Supplier management
- Safety compliance
- Asset management
- Demand and supply planning
- Production planning
These processes — many of which are already automated and fine-tuned for specific use cases — are tightly intertwined with the SAP systems that manufacturers have spent years, if not decades, building and refining to fit their unique needs. That’s why, though SAP’s looming end-of-support deadlines for on-premises ECC and S/4HANA releases are just around the corner, many manufacturers are reluctant to eliminate them completely — and rightfully so, as these systems remain incredibly valuable.
To address such issues, many manufacturers are taking a more pragmatic path than SAP’s prescribed roadmap: Keeping the reliable SAP “engine” intact through third-party support and changing the “suspension” — that is, making improvements around it.
Rather than ripping and replacing the SAP systems they’ve customized over the years, manufacturers are obtaining independent support to prolong their lifespans, then using Agentic AI ERP to unlock the value already embedded within them. After all, ERP systems have long served as the backbone of manufacturing operations; they contain a wealth of data that can be applied for analysis and process improvement.
The real KPI for manufacturers: Time to value, not feature parity
Manufacturing ERP environments are uniquely complicated, as they typically involve:
- Multi‑vendor, heavily integrated, on‑premises landscapes
- Extensive customization to support competitive advantage
- Tight coupling between IT and OT systems
- Information flowing from and to SAP from supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), industrial internet of things (IIoT), manufacturing execution system (MES) and hundreds of other industry-specific systems
- Layers of regulatory, safety and environmental compliance
- Data decentralized, transformed and stitched together across data lakes and fabrics
This means that although the ERP may be the largest core system, it’s not the only source of truth. As such, reimplementing it rarely produces the vendor-promised ROI. In fact, research shows that 70% of ERP migrations are stalled, delayed or completed far over budget.[1]
Additionally, the manufacturing industry — notoriously cost-conscious — faces rising material and labor costs, along with macroeconomic challenges such as deglobalization and supply chain instability. When the race for survival is via automation, end-to-end process intelligence, robotic automation and precision manufacturing, the case for undergoing a multimillion-dollar ERP migration becomes even weaker.
Keeping your existing SAP system running smoothly and layering Agentic AI over the top, on the other hand, is a faster, better and cheaper alternative to vendor‑mandated cloud migrations. Agentic AI ERP transforms existing processes and data into actionable insights and automated workflows for faster time to value. Further, it retains the core ERP as a strategic asset — as opposed to eliminating all unique processes and customizations in favor of a standard implementation — and helps avoid getting locked into a cloud subscription model with unpredictable pricing.
Why Agentic AI ERP is a game changer for manufacturers
As mentioned, the value gap between what ERP vendors like SAP promise and what they actually deliver has widened over time. Traditional ERP roadmaps continue to involve costly, multiyear upgrades or migrations that offer uncertain ROI. Yet the decomposition of ERP started years ago and has sped up since the introduction of AI.
Even five years ago, CIOs and CTOs struggled with the high cost and complexity of integrations, tight IT/OT coupling and the ongoing effort required to maintain multiple data lakes, cubes and plant historians. Insights were hours out of date (at best), dependent on heavy translation work and limited by fragmented architectures.
These barriers are still in place, and at the same time, manufacturers are stuck with an overwhelming maintenance‑to‑innovation imbalance, with the vast majority of IT spend going to support rather than new capabilities.
Agentic AI ERP provides a much-needed paradigm shift by:
- Treating AI, not the ERP, as an operating system for the enterprise
- Delivering hyper‑personalization, hyperautomation and real‑time decisioning, regardless of where data resides or how many systems are involved
- Providing meaningful outcomes in weeks or months at a fraction of the cost
- Replacing the vendor‑driven “boil‑the‑ocean” model with a headless modernization strategy
With Agentic AI ERP, intelligent, autonomous agents orchestrate processes across SAP and non‑SAP systems, fetching federated data and surfacing insights directly to users. Employees don’t have to toggle back and forth between applications or reconcile conflicting data sets — the intelligence comes to them.
By decoupling innovation from the vendor roadmap, Agentic AI ERP also restores manufacturers’ commercial leverage, helping them avoid licensing traps, forced updates, increased OPEX from cloud consumption models and the loss of ownership or control that accompanies subscription‑based architectures.
It modernizes the business without exposing it to data‑location risks, latency issues or unnecessary replatforming.
Real manufacturing use cases already delivering value
Agentic AI ERP’s impact isn’t theoretical. Companies are already seeing the potential for enhanced productivity, greater agility and reduced cost after adopting this new model with help from Rimini Street.
Delivering its first set of 20 Rimini Agentic UX™ Solutions, Rimini Street demonstrates how manufacturers and other organizations can easily streamline and automate critical business processes such as:
- Work order management: AI-assisted creation, scheduling and tracking of maintenance work orders
- Project order fulfillment: Coordination and visibility of order fulfillment from release to delivery
- Procurement requisitions: Guided creation and approval of purchase requisitions with policy and budget validation
Client proof of concept outcomes from Rimini Agentic UX Solutions include 70–80% reduction in order cycle time, 100% increase in audit readiness and >95% improvement in data accuracy — all without changing the underlying ERP system.
How manufacturers can strengthen existing ERP without replatforming
Manufacturers don’t need to migrate to SAP Cloud ERP to modernize. The fastest and lowest‑risk way to strengthen SAP environments is to extend them — not replace them — and ensure a solid ERP foundation to move forward.
1.Prolong system life with third-party support
The path to Agentic AI ERP starts with reliable support for existing ERP systems. By leveraging third-party support from a trusted provider such as Rimini Street, manufacturers can keep their systems running smoothly for years to come, including ISO-certified tax, legal and regulatory updates across 160+ countries — saving up to 50% on annual support fees in the process. This approach gives companies the time to plan strategically without downtime or compromise. Moreover, it enables them to retain the critical customizations that provide competitive advantage and differentiation rather than eliminating them in favor of a “Clean Core.”
2. Bring AI to the ERP — not the other way around
It’s true that SAP and other ERP vendors are racing to launch their own AI agents. However, those capabilities are tied to each vendor’s platform, licensing model and upgrade/migration cycle. For manufacturers running multi-vendor, highly customized landscapes, this creates more dependency instead of more flexibility. That’s why you shouldn’t rely on ERP vendors as your only source for AI capabilities.
No single ERP instance in manufacturing will contain all the business logic and data. But adding an AI layer can Optimize and automate core processes from end to end.
Agentic AI ERP reframes ERP as a data source, and layering Agentic AI over the top can introduce process-wide orchestration that reduces decision latency and enables automation. This means manufacturers can dramatically improve processes such as Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Plan to Make, and Forecast to Stock and Design to Deliver. Currently, these processes are typically slowed by manual steps and disconnected workflows that SAP alone can’t resolve.
3. Modernize iteratively — one use case at a time
Unlike large‑scale ERP reimplementations that require years of planning and deliver value only at the end, Agentic AI ERP enables manufacturers to start small, prove outcomes and scale quickly — an opportunity that’s strongly recommended by analysts and industry leaders. Taking this approach reduces risk, accelerates time to value and allows teams to “fail fast” in low-impact areas while building up momentum and learnings for successful advancements.
4. Shift from historical reporting to real-time intelligence
Most SAP reporting today depends on heavy data movement and reconciliation of backward-looking information. Agentic AI ERP can help replace these lagging indicators with predictive analytics and real‑time decision intelligence.
Instead of waiting for batch‑processed reports, AI delivers live, aggregated insights from federated data across operational systems — enabling faster, more confident and proactive decision-making.
Key takeaways
Manufacturers don’t need to migrate to SAP Cloud ERP via RISE to innovate faster and smarter. By extending the life of their existing SAP systems through third-party support and layering Agentic AI over the top, manufacturers can unlock massive value from the systems they already own and gain a competitive advantage — no reimplementation required.
Learn how the Rimini Smart Path™ enables companies to accelerate innovation through Agentic AI ERP, within existing budget — delivering measurable outcomes in weeks or months, not years.
[1] ERP Integration Failures: Why 70% of B2B Migrations in 2025 Are Over Budget or Stalled,” Tech Line Media, retrieved 6 February 2026 from https://techlinemedia.com/b2b-blogs/erp-integration-failures-why-70-of-b2b-migrations-in-2025-are-over-budget-or-stalled/
