Episode #14: Stakeholder buy-in at scale: How to mobilize 80 countries behind one SAP transformation | Jorge Lopez (Syngenta Group)
A reverse, customer-led approach that turns early stakeholder engagement into stronger ownership, faster adoption and less resistance.
Stakeholder buy-in at scale: How to mobilize 80 countries behind one SAP transformation at Syngenta Group
Large ERP programmes do not struggle because the technology is wrong. They struggle because too many leaders treat stakeholder engagement as something to intensify shortly before go-live. In this conversation with Jorge Lopez, S/4 HANA Global Program Director at Syngenta Group, a different picture emerges: winning the hearts and minds of the organisation is not a late-stage activity. It is a continuous strategic discipline that starts early, shapes the programme design, and continues well beyond deployment.
Most leaders agree with that in principle. Far fewer build their programmes that way.
Summary
This episode explores how Syngenta approached a global S/4HANA transformation across 80 countries and 10 production sites. Jorge explains how early stakeholder engagement, business-led framing, distributed governance, strong team culture, data discipline and trusted partner collaboration helped the programme build momentum and sustain adoption. The conversation is valuable because it does not reduce success to go-live. It shows that long-term adoption depends on how the programme is understood, owned and experienced from the start.
Stakeholder engagement is not a workstream at the end
A familiar pattern appears in many large transformations. The headquarters team defines the roadmap, confirms the design, secures the budget and moves at speed. Regions and functions are involved, but mostly after the direction has already been set. Then, as go-live approaches, the organisation suddenly starts talking more intensely about adoption.
That sequence is flawed. What Jorge describes is the opposite. He is clear that a transformation only succeeds if it helps the business deliver tangible outcomes, if the organisation is ready to use the new technology from day one, and if the data and platform are strong enough to support scale. That already moves the conversation away from launch optics and toward business value.
But the more important point is this: stakeholder engagement cannot begin when the solution is already locked. At that point, most of the real influence has passed. If local leaders, regional teams and functions only enter the conversation late, what follows is usually not commitment. It is qualified acceptance, passive resistance, slower decisions and weaker ownership.
That matters because ROI depends on behaviour. Systems only create value when people use them well, trust them and change how decisions are made. If stakeholder engagement starts too late, adoption becomes slower, and the business case takes longer to materialise.
There is also a straightforward behavioural principle underneath this. People are more likely to support what they understand, what they helped shape and what they believe solves a real problem for them. They are far less likely to commit to something that feels imposed, abstract or centrally convenient. That is not theory. It is programme reality.
What Jorge did differently
1. He did not start from the system. He started with the customer.
One of the strongest insights in the episode is Jorge’s description of what he calls a reverse approach. Instead of starting in headquarters and pushing the programme outward, the team put the customer at the centre and worked through that lens.
That choice changed the conversation. Rather than asking countries to get behind an ERP migration, the programme asked them to engage around customer pain points, operational improvement and better business outcomes. The country teams were equipped to speak to customers directly. Across 45 countries, they interviewed 500 customers to understand where improvement was needed.
That created two advantages at once. First, it gave the programme better business input. Second, it made the transformation feel relevant to the countries. The discussion moved away from “another central IT initiative” and toward practical improvements in customer experience and productivity.
That is a very important distinction. People in the business will rarely rally around architecture decisions. They will rally around better outcomes.
2. He built commitment through functions, regions and countries
This was not simply a case of early regional involvement. What Syngenta built was broader than that: early engagement across functions, regions and countries, backed by a governance structure that reflected that reality.
There was a global steering committee, but it focused on the overall roadmap, budget, timeline and escalations. Beyond that, the programme mobilised functions and regions early, set up regional cross-functional steering, and created country-level ownership for the last mile.
That matters because a global programme cannot be carried out by headquarters alone. It needs distributed accountability. Jorge even replicated his own role in the regions so that leadership and accountability were not seen as purely central.
This is more than governance design. It is a signal to the organisation about where ownership sits. And that signal has consequences. When regions and countries feel they are there to execute someone else’s plan, engagement drops. When they feel they have accountability inside the programme, commitment rises.
3. He used a common purpose to reduce the usual global-versus-local fight
Many global programmes assume that broader involvement will increase requests for localisation and weaken process consistency. Jorge’s experience suggests something more interesting.
Because the programme was anchored in customer outcomes, many country teams were less focused on defending local variants and more focused on solving the problem well. In finance, the programme kept close to 90 per cent standardisation. In production, supply and customer service, the number was lower but still high, with local variation mainly driven by real market or legal requirements.
That is a useful lesson for CIOs. Standardisation does not become harder simply because more people are engaged. It becomes harder when engagement starts too late, trust is low, and the programme is framed as a central imposition instead of shared problem-solving.
4. He treated team culture as an execution lever
The conversation also goes much further on team leadership than most programme summaries usually do. Jorge talks very concretely about how the programme team worked: one team, one plan, shared values, transparency, speaking up, supporting each other, keeping simplicity outside and complexity inside.
That is not cosmetic. In a three-year programme under pressure, team behaviour shapes delivery quality, decision speed and stakeholder confidence. When a cross-functional team from finance, IT, commercial, supply and partners behaves as a coherent unit, the organisation feels that. When the team fragments, stakeholders notice that too.
Jorge’s point is that culture had to be built deliberately at the beginning, before tension rose. The team invested time early in how they wanted to work together, not just in what they wanted to deliver. They also used surveys to check the temperature of the team, address issues and close the loop. After three years, he still reports around 80 per cent team satisfaction.
That is not a side note. It helps explain why the programme could sustain energy, focus and credibility over time.
5. He is unequivocal about data
If one topic comes through as more painful than expected, it is data. Jorge is very direct on this. Cleaning, improving and migrating decades of ERP data across 80 countries was one of the hardest parts of the programme. Customer and vendor data in particular required major effort, over a long period, with real risk near the go-live line.
That deserves a clearer conclusion than most transformation write-ups give it.
Data is not only a technical quality issue. It is a business confidence issue. Weak data undermines trust in the new environment, slows adoption and creates avoidable friction right when leaders need momentum. Jorge’s account makes clear that strong data work is not administrative overhead. It is part of business readiness, adoption readiness and future value creation, including for AI use cases.
6. He highlights the role of partners
Another strong point in the conversation is partner collaboration. Jorge is explicit that this level of complexity cannot be handled well without strong, trust-based relationships across the wider delivery ecosystem.
In this programme, multiple partners such as SAP, EY and COSYN co-created this journey. That matters because large transformations do not succeed through technical delivery alone. They need aligned execution, strong stakeholder engagement, clear decision support and consistent leadership across internal and external teams.
Too many programmes still treat partners as capacity rather than as part of the delivery system. In reality, if trust is weak across internal and external teams, coordination suffers, decisions slow down and stakeholder confidence drops.
Key Takeaways: What IT Leaders Should Remember
Stakeholder engagement must start long before go-live.
Business value is a stronger mobiliser than system logic.
Functions, regions and countries need visible accountability.
Team culture affects adoption more than most leaders admit.
Data quality is a business risk, not just a technical task.
Having strong partners at your side is mission-critical.
If you are leading a global SAP or ERP transformation, this episode is worth your attention. Jorge offers a grounded view of what it takes to build ownership, maintain standardisation, strengthen team performance and reduce stakeholder risk in a programme at real scale.
Listen to the full episode to hear how Syngenta approached stakeholder engagement, governance, business ownership, data discipline and partner collaboration across a transformation running at real scale.
About your host
Arne Kötting founded COSYN after years of seeing organisations struggle with the human side of tech change. He built the Change Playbook to codify what actually works based on 20 years of watching these patterns.
The Change Playbook is designed for IT program teams to confidently manage the human side of tech change in-house, without expensive consulting dependencies.
His conversational style cuts through complexity to reveal the fundamental principles that make tech change communication work - principles you can apply 1:1 to your own transformation challenges.
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