BEYOND ESSENTIALS
Building an internal SAP team starts with a spreadsheet most CFOs never want to open: salaries, recruiting fees, onboarding time, the cost of covering a sick day across four time zones. CATENSYS skipped that spreadsheet entirely.
CATENSYS, a chain-drive manufacturer carved out of Schaeffler in 2022, never built a large internal SAP department. Instead, it ran its global support through UNITED VARS members. "With the use of Global Application Services, we estimate savings of at least 20 to 40 percent in costs compared to building our own internal team," says Axel von Bauer, CFO at CATENSYS.
That range reflects real SAP implementation costs – recruiting, onboarding, and 24/7 coverage across multiple countries – that a mid-market company usually underestimates until it's deep into hiring for them. "Cost savings are, of course, something that, with the Application Services, we aim for as a key objective," von Bauer adds.
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Money saved is one number. Capacity freed is the more interesting one. With routine support absorbed by the alliance, CATENSYS ran multiple IT projects in parallel – EDI roll-outs, analytics dashboards, a PLM rollout, and initiatives to strengthen IT security and resilience.
"As an example, we were able, with the Application Services, to run 8 IT projects simultaneously – which for such a small company would have been hard to handle with internal resources," von Bauer says. For a mid-market IT leader, this is the gap that usually stalls strategic plans: a lean team buried in break-fix tickets with no bandwidth left for the strategic work waiting behind it.
Outsourcing SAP support works better for multi-country compliance because the work needs someone who already knows the local rules, not someone learning them on the ticket. In India, CATENSYS needed SAP processing that met local GST requirements – a statutory area with its own reporting formats, challan rules, and Z-program logic that doesn't transfer from one country to the next.
That work went to Answerthink, the UNITED VARS member operating across the US and, through its Hackett Group network, India and South Korea. Answerthink completed and optimized the GST-compliant challan processing CATENSYS needed, including the additional reports and custom development the Indian requirement called for. A generalist support desk could file a ticket on this. Closing it correctly needed someone who already understood Indian statutory SAP requirements going in.
CATENSYS also tells this story on camera, walking through the carve-out, their decision in favour of the UNITED VARS alliance, and what changed for their team from day one.
The 20 - 40 percent figure is the number that gets a budget conversation started. The eight parallel projects are the number that actually changes what the IT team can deliver. And the India compliance work is the reminder that "global support" has to hold up in every country where the company operates, including the markets that rarely make the pitch deck.
For a mid-market company weighing whether to grow an internal SAP team or lean on outside support, the comparison that matters covers cost, plus what the team gets to work on once routine support stops eating the calendar.
Mid-sized companies should go global without losing speed or local identity. UNITED VARS brings together hand-picked local market leaders with real people on the ground in 100+ countries to remove legal, cultural, and language barriers. As a strategic alliance, UNITED VARS provides clear accountability from start to finish. UNITED VARS is the world's only SAP Platinum Partner alliance, delivering end-to-end SAP services for the mid-market.
stronger than one.