Founder of Authentic Advisory | Business Consultant | Change Management | AI Strategy | Technology Adoption | Mentoring | Presenter & Speaker | Small Business
The Setup Nobody Wants to Admit:
Most enterprise technology programs do not fail because the software is wrong. They fail in the gap between what was promised in the boardroom and what actually happens when a thousand people are asked to work differently on a Monday morning. The software works. The people are not the problem either. The problem lives in the space between them, in the governance structures that were never built, the competing priorities that were never resolved, and the executive sponsorship that looked committed on paper and evaporated under pressure. Andrew Hunt has been watching this happen for more than two decades. He has watched it from three different seats at the table.
The Rarest Credential in Enterprise Consulting:
Andrew Hunt is the Global Alliances Manager at excelerated and the founder of Authentic Advisory, a boutique practice built on a simple but difficult premise: that the organizations best positioned to succeed with transformation are not the ones with the biggest budgets, but the ones willing to treat change as seriously as they treat configuration. With a combined 25 years of experience as an SAP customer, an SAP partner, and an SAP employee, Hunt operates in a space very few consultants can claim. He has sat on all three sides of the table, and that perspective is not incidental to his work. It is work.
From Olympic Dam to New York: How Every Role Added a Layer
Andrew Hunt’s career did not begin in consulting. It began in the operational trenches of one of the world’s most demanding resource environments. At BHP, where he spent more than eight years across Copper, Uranium, Petroleum, Coal, and Iron Ore, Hunt was responsible for supporting procurement and logistics operations connected to an annual spend exceeding A$150 million. He worked across sites including Olympic Dam, Cannington, and Cerro Matosa, South America, supporting more than eleven ERP implementations across the group and leading category sourcing and process improvement teams that had to deliver results in environments where downtime was not an abstraction. It was measured in dollars per hour.
That operational foundation shaped everything that came after. When Hunt moved into consulting at SMEC, leading supply chain and asset management delivery teams across the resources and engineering sectors, he already understood something many consultants spend years learning too late: that a technically correct deployment means nothing if the people responsible for running it were never genuinely brought along. He led teams through configuration, data, change management, and training, and he watched the difference between programs that landed and programs that quietly stalled.
The SAP appointment that followed formalized what Hunt had already learned in the field. As Head of Business Network for Asia Pacific and Japan and Value Engineering, roles which he held over nine years, he worked with clients across strategic procurement, supply chain, and logistics transformations, helping organizations achieve savings, reduce risk, efficiency, adopt AI capabilities, and meet ESG commitments. The scale was significant. The complexity was real. And the pattern he kept encountering was consistent. Organizations that succeeded were not the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They were the ones that had done the harder, quieter work of aligning their people, their governance, and their foundations, their priorities before the software ever went live.
The Stalled Deployment, the Reset, and What Actually Fixed It
Today, through Authentic Advisory and his alliance work at excelerated, Andrew Hunt specializes in exactly the situations that other consultants have already attempted and left behind. His clients are organizations where something has gone wrong, not catastrophically, but quietly. Programs that were supposed to be live are still in concept. Adoption numbers that looked acceptable in the steering committee report are not reflected in how people actually work. The technology is capable. The investment has been made. And nothing is moving.
One recent engagement captures the nature of this work. A large AI data center provider with global operations, European IT led and US-based business functions had a stalled SAP deployment. The program had not failed in any dramatic sense. It had simply stopped progressing. Hunt’s first move was not to look at the technology. It was to look at the original solution mix and understand what investment decisions were actually being made against what roadmap. What he found was a system landscape where manual processes and available system capabilities existed side by side, unresolved, creating confusion about what the future state was even supposed to look like.
“We reset the organisation structure, highlighted the gap between what was being done manually and what the system could already do, and then proposed a future landscape that people could actually see themselves in,” Hunt explains. “Once there was clarity on where the investment was going, the organization was ready to move.”
The outcome was significant reinvestment and redeployment of a future-ready solution with embedded AI use cases, driving efficiency, compliance, savings, and adoption across a previously stalled program. The technology had not really changed. The clarity had.
This is the pattern Hunt returns to consistently. When organizations struggle with adoption because of competing priorities, the answer is not necessarily a better training program or a revised communication plan. “Free up the resources to focus on the project rather than BAU,” he says. “Competing priorities are the single most common reason programs stall, and they are almost always a governance decision that nobody wants to make.”
His philosophy on commercial relationships is equally direct, and equally counterintuitive for an industry that often rewards volume. Hunt’s measure of a healthy advisory relationship is not the number of engagements. It is the quality and sustainability of what those engagements produce.
“Close fewer, larger deals that are achievable with the delivery resources available,” he says. “If you overcommit and underdeliver, you have not built a trusted relationship. You have just created a more expensive problem.”
The Question Every Stalled Program Is Really Asking
There is a version of the SAP adoption problem that gets discussed in boardrooms as a technology problem, a vendor problem, or a resourcing problem. Andrew Hunt has spent 25 years watching organizations cycle through each of those explanations without resolving the underlying issue. The programs that succeed are the ones that treat change with the same rigor they apply to configuration. Executive sponsorship that is visible and consistent. Governance that resolves competing priorities rather than documenting them. Resources that are genuinely freed to focus on the program rather than split across business-as-usual demands.
The organizations that find Andrew Hunt usually arrive after they have tried the other explanations. What they discover is that the answer was never in the software.
Andrew Hunt (GCertMngt) is the Global Alliances Manager at excelerated and the founder of Authentic Advisory, based in New York, NY. He works with organizations navigating complex SAP and Source-to-Pay transformations, helping them move from stalled deployments to sustained adoption and measurable results. To connect with Andrew or learn more, visit linkedin.com/in/andrewphunt or excelerateds2p.com.
