SAP has awarded SimpleFi Solutions Expert tier in the SAP Business Data Cloud competency. Expert is the highest of the three tiers in SAP’s partner competency framework.
What Expert tier actually requires
The framework has three levels. Essential recognizes partners who have met SAP’s delivery and training requirements in a product or process area. Advanced adds certified expertise and a larger record of implementations that ended in customer success. Expert sits above both.
SAP reserves Expert tier for partners who have taken customers through end-to-end transformation, and who have developed their own solution capability in that competency area. The second requirement is the harder one. It asks whether a partner has built something, rather than only delivered somebody else’s software.
For us, that is PlaniFi, our pre-packaged EPM product line on SAP technology, including the PlaniFi Data Consolidator for SAP Business Data Cloud.
One point of precision, because the two words get used interchangeably and they should not be. A competency is tiered. A specialization is not. Specializations are the building blocks that accumulate toward a competency, so a tier is always a statement about the competency as a whole.
Why the data foundation decides whether AI works
This matters more than a partner badge normally would, because of where AI programs actually fail.
Gartner puts it plainly. Through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects that are unsupported by AI-ready data. Read the qualifier, because it carries the whole finding. Gartner is not saying six in ten AI projects fail. It is saying six in ten fail when the data underneath them is not ready. In the same research, 63% of organizations either do not have the data management practices AI needs, or do not know whether they have them.
Most finance teams recognize the shape of this. Point of sale data sits in one platform. Manufacturing sits in another. Market data sits somewhere else again, and finance sits in the ERP. Those are four systems out of many, and each one carries its own view of what a region is, or a product group, or a version, or a business unit.
A model pointed at that will not stop and tell you the pieces do not line up. It answers anyway. Worse, it answers with exactly the confidence it shows when it is right. The risk is not a wrong number somebody catches in review. It is a plausible number nobody catches at all.
What Business Data Cloud changes
SAP Business Data Cloud addresses that directly. It brings SAP and non-SAP data together while keeping the business meaning attached to it. Not another copy of the data, and not another extract to reconcile. The same data, governed, with the context still on it.
That governed layer is what turns an AI answer into something a finance team can defend in front of a board.
What we build on top of it
Every piece of AI work we do starts there. Enablement that changes how experienced people actually work. AI inside SAP rather than sitting beside it. Agents that run real process, from the month end close to plain-language budget entry. And our own delivery, run on AI, so clients can ask whether we have done it to ourselves before we recommend it to them.
Those are four different programs. They stand on one foundation, and not one of them is worth much without it.
Anyone can sell you a model. Almost nobody can make your data worth pointing one at.
Talk to us
If your AI plans are waiting on a data foundation you do not fully trust yet, that is the conversation we are best at. Start with our Data Strategy and Platform Advisory, or get in touch.
Source: Gartner, “Lack of AI-Ready Data Puts AI Projects at Risk,” press release, 26 February 2025.