Financial Transparency: Know Where AMS Money Actually Goes

{
  "id": "ams-032",
  "title": "Financial Transparency: Know Where AMS Money Actually Goes",
  "hook": "If you can’t explain why AMS costs what it costs, you can’t reduce it without breaking something important.",
  "idea": "Modern SAP AMS treats cost as an observable signal, not as an accounting afterthought. Money follows demand drivers, instability, and bad decisions — and can be redirected deliberately.",
  "sap_cost_reality": {
    "where_money_really_burns": [
      "Recurring incidents disguised as ‘operations’",
      "Change rework due to poor testing or unclear scope",
      "Coordination overhead across teams and vendors",
      "Authorization and data quality chaos",
      "Custom code regression babysitting"
    ],
    "what_cost_reports_usually_hide": [
      "Cost of delay for unresolved Problems",
      "Cost of repeated diagnostics",
      "Cost of firefighting during upgrades",
      "Cost of knowledge gaps and bad handovers"
    ]
  },
  "cost_to_serve_model": {
    "dimensions": [
      "Cost per business flow (OTC, P2P, RTR, MDM)",
      "Cost per incident family (symptom cluster)",
      "Cost per change class (standard / normal / high-risk)",
      "Cost per coordination boundary (internal ↔ vendor ↔ business)"
    ],
    "rule": "If cost cannot be attributed to a flow or driver, it cannot be reduced."
  },
  "financial_views": {
    "operational_view": [
      "AMS effort by demand driver",
      "Repeat vs one-off cost ratio",
      "Cost of change-induced incidents"
    ],
    "management_view": [
      "Top 10 cost drivers and trends",
      "Cost avoided via problem elimination",
      "Automation ROI (hours eliminated)"
    ],
    "strategic_view": [
      "Cost tied to SAP lock-in",
      "Cost shifted to edges/open stack",
      "Upgrade-related cost spikes"
    ]
  },
  "decision_rules": [
    "Fund work that removes recurring cost before funding cosmetic change.",
    "If prevention cost < 2 quarters of support cost, it is mandatory.",
    "If a change increases long-term cost, require explicit acceptance.",
    "Cost without an owner becomes waste by default."
  ],
  "budget_allocation": {
    "fixed_capacity": [
      "Baseline operations (keep the lights on)",
      "Mandatory compliance and security work"
    ],
    "variable_capacity": [
      "Problem elimination",
      "Automation and standardization",
      "Edge/off-core improvements"
    ],
    "protection_rule": "Prevention and automation budget cannot be raided to cover poor change quality."
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Attribute effort automatically to flows and drivers.",
      "Estimate cost of delay for Problems.",
      "Simulate cost impact of prioritization decisions.",
      "Generate financial narratives for leadership."
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "Cost driver heatmap",
      "Quarterly cost-to-serve report",
      "Prevention ROI dashboard"
    ]
  },
  "why_this_changes_conversations": [
    "Cost discussions move from blame to levers.",
    "Leadership sees where to invest, not just where to cut.",
    "AMS earns trust as a system optimizer."
  ],
  "anti_patterns_to_kill": [
    "Flat rate cost discussions",
    "Across-the-board cuts",
    "Ignoring cost of instability"
  ],
  "metrics_that_force_clarity": [
    "Cost per resolved business impact",
    "Repeat cost ratio",
    "Cost avoided via Problems",
    "Automation payback period"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "Which AMS costs are we choosing — and which are choosing us?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-032.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-032.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "If you can’t explain why AMS costs what it costs, you can’t reduce it without breaking something important."
  }
}