Rich, the CIO of a manufacturing company was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. His team had lost two critical ABAP programmers in the same month, and his team was struggling to complete the S4-HANA migration deliverables on time. He was considering hiring a remote team from Thinking Minds Inc. when he received an email from one of his ABAP programmers. Even though the programmer had left the company but was still interested in helping with the migration project. Rich was a bit relieved and grateful. With the help of his programmer and the remote team from Thinking Minds., the project was completed on time and within budget. Rich was impressed with the quality of work and the team’s professionalism, and he has since hired them for other projects.
Before: Losing critical ABAP programmers during the S4HANA migration project would cause any good IT leader many headaches. He was unsure if they could complete the project on time.
After: The remote resources from Thinking Minds Inc. could come in and help with the complex ABAP code, which saved the CIO’s team many headaches. The project was completed on time and within budget, which was a huge relief for him. Here is what he had to say.
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Thinking Minds Inc. was the perfect partner for our S4HANA migration project. Their remote resources were able to work on complex ABAP code and hit the ground running from day one. The entire team was extremely professional, knowledgeable, and a joy to work with.
Their help during the project saved us a lot of headaches with custom objects in ABAP which were created over the last 15 years – I was unsure if we were up for the challenge and if we could stay within a reasonable time and budget. But with their help, we could get the custom code documented and migrate it! They also provided big help in the conversion data migrations from MS Dynamics to SAP ECC/S4HANA.
Michael, special thanks to you for shepherding the resources for the S4 migration during these days of remote work. Without your team’s expertise, we would have been lost. You not only saved our project, but you also saved our unit a significant cost and time. We are truly grateful for the assistance.
Sincerely,
Rich
This happens more often than anyone admits
Rich’s story is dramatic, but the underlying pattern is ordinary. Senior ABAPers are walking out of companies at an unusual rate right now, and the reasons are structural. The S/4HANA conversion wave created a seller’s market for exactly the skill set these developers have: deep knowledge of custom ABAP, data migration experience, and the scar tissue from real go-lives. Recruiters know this. The people who understand your fifteen years of custom objects are the same people getting three calls a week from staffing firms, often with remote work and a raise attached.
There is a second, quieter driver. A lot of senior ABAPers spent the last decade doing maintenance on aging ECC systems while the interesting work, Fiori, RAP, and BTP, went to someone else. When the only career development on offer is more of the same tickets, the exit interview writes itself. Companies that treat their ABAP team as a cost center to be minimized should not be surprised when the market treats them as talent to be acquired.
The first 30 days after they walk out
Panic is understandable. Panic as a plan is not. When a critical ABAPer leaves, run this triage in the first month:
- Inventory what they owned. Custom objects, interfaces, batch jobs, reports, the month-end programs only they ever touched. Pull the transport history and the support tickets with their name on them. You cannot protect what you have not listed.
- Secure the access. Deactivate accounts, rotate shared credentials, and review what they could still reach. Do this on day one, kindly but completely.
- Find the undocumented code. Every long-tenured developer has code that exists only in their head. Interview the remaining team now, while memories are fresh, and document the “tribal knowledge” objects first: the ones nobody else understands.
- Freeze non-critical changes in the areas they owned until someone qualified has reviewed the code. The worst time to discover a fragile dependency is during an unrelated enhancement.
- Bring in interim help fast. A senior contract ABAPer who has done S/4 conversions can stabilize the situation in weeks. Waiting three months to hire the perfect full-time replacement while deliverables slip is how Rich nearly had his breakdown.
Knowledge transfer that actually survives contact with reality
The standard corporate answer to key-person risk is “document everything,” which fails because nobody documents everything. What works is targeted and habitual. Require object-level documentation for custom developments as part of the transport process, not as a separate chore that never happens. Run the ABAP Test Cockpit custom code checks regularly so the codebase stays readable by strangers. Record short walkthrough videos when a developer finishes a complex object; a twenty-minute screen recording beats a fifty-page document nobody will read. And rotate maintenance: if only one person ever touches the pricing routines, you do not have a developer, you have a single point of failure with a desk.
Keeping the next one from leaving
Retention is cheaper than replacement, and the math is not close: replacing a senior ABAPer costs months of productivity plus the risk Rich lived through. The levers are not mysterious. Pay at market, because your developers know what the market is. Offer remote flexibility, because the competing offers all do. Give them modern work: developers who get to build with RAP, Fiori, and BTP stay; developers parked on maintenance tickets leave. And give the work visibility: the ABAP team that only hears from leadership when something breaks will eventually find leadership that notices them before things break. Rich learned this the expensive way. You do not have to.
