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Asda budgeted £800m. The bill came to £1,224m.

Project Future separated the UK's third largest supermarket from Walmart's systems and put it on SAP S/4HANA hosted in Microsoft Azure, live in January 2024.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by The Register · Edition no. 1

Cumulative cash outflow to 31 December 2025: £1,224 million. Exceptional costs in 2025 alone: £284 million.

Most large programmes overspend. Very few get an explanation this direct from the chairman:

"The downturn in sales and to a degree the market share issue is totally driven by Future, it's not driven by any competitive activity."

That is Allan Leighton telling the market that the ERP programme, and nothing a competitor did, moved Asda's market share. He called the IT problems totally self-inflicted and gave three reasons: poor integration, insufficient testing, and a lack of capacity planning.

None of the three is a technical decision. All three were settled in governance meetings months before anybody logged into the new system.

Which of the three would an honest review find in your programme this morning?

Sources

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Your reading room

Companies in this story
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Our file on SAP

  1. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP says its network handles over $8 trillion of trade a year. Its AI agent post names no customer.

  2. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP says AI agents handle more than 90% of a wholesaler's 100,000 supplier confirmations unaided. Its Takeda figures are forecasts.

  3. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP says Somerset Council moved about 8,500 staff off its 17-year-old payroll system in 13 months, on budget. Nobody named the budget.

  4. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP offered 300 AI agents. Workday's product chief, a former SAP executive, called the autonomous enterprise idea "cold and soulless".

  5. 4 NovFiled later

    SAP won a Dutch military cloud deal of up to ten years. The ministry says it does not end its SAP dependence.

All 101 SAP stories

For your next steering committee

Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask for the approved budget and the current forecast on the same scope, side by side.
  2. 2Ask which costs sit outside the programme budget today: internal staff, data migration, parallel running.
  3. 3Ask who may approve the next increase, and at what amount the programme goes back to the board.

Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01

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Welcome back. · Issue 01

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