Procurement Insights | Jon Hansen | February 2026
I’ve been preparing for the upcoming executive briefing on the SAP Ariba consolidated assessment — the one built on 233 articles, 18 years of evidence, and the three-phase Hansen Fit Score™ methodology. As part of that preparation, I’ve been stress-testing the Q&A scenarios with my AI advisory team.
One of the models asked me to prepare “defensible” 30-second answers to the fifteen most likely audience questions.
I stopped it.
Not because the answers were wrong. They were actually quite good. But because the word defensible revealed a posture I have no intention of adopting.
The Question That Changed the Prep
The first question on the list was straightforward: How exactly is the Hansen Fit Score calculated?
The model drafted a clean, structured answer. Lead with credibility. Name the five dimensions. Explain the elasticity. Keep it tight. Make it defensible in 30 seconds.
I pushed back. Not on the content — on the framing.
Why do we need to defend anything within 30 seconds? I don’t want to defend. I want to engage. I want to be challenged to establish mutual understanding despite our different backgrounds. This is not a cookie-cutter model.
That distinction matters more than any score I’ll present on screen.
Defense Narrows. Engagement Elevates.
When you enter a room in defense mode, you narrow the exchange. You’re bracing for attack. You’re optimizing for survival. Every question becomes a threat to manage.
When you enter in engagement mode, you elevate the room. You’re inviting inquiry. You’re creating space for practitioners — people who live inside these implementations every day — to compare their lived experience against longitudinal evidence.
Those are fundamentally different intellectual postures.
A cookie-cutter model says: This score predicts everything.
The Hansen Fit Score says: Across 27 years and more than 180 implementations, structural alignment patterns repeat. Let’s examine them together.
That’s not a pitch. It’s an invitation.
What 2008 Taught Me About 2026
I’ve been doing this a long time. Long enough that the testimonials from my early seminar work tell a story that still applies.
Adam Cooper, who was at Canadian Tire in 2008 and is now CTO of McDonald’s Canada, described what happened in the room: “Jon had a very creative and engaging way of presenting the seminar material. The class fed off his energy which made for very interesting discussions and he was able to play on the class’s wide range of experience and employers.”
Sal Nazarali, a global procurement and supply chain executive, captured the substance: “Jon made it clear that the Supply Chain industry is much more complex and generalizations are a thing of the past. He described multiple ways for Supply Chain Professionals to express the necessary changes needed… Overall his seminar was very informative, interactive and armed the attendees to go back to their existing roles at work to pursue Supply Chain excellence.”
And Dianne Mowat, from Inergi, identified what made the approach different: “I was quite surprised that he didn’t promote the latest flavour of procurement… instead he asked us to use common-sense and not allow technology to define our business process… how refreshing!”
Three testimonials from three different professionals. Same pattern: interactive, grounded, anti-dogma.
Not selling. Surfacing.
Not lecturing. Inviting.
Not promoting flavour-of-the-month. Provoking thoughtful discomfort.
What This Means for the SAP Ariba Briefing
When someone in the briefing asks how the score is calculated, they’re not necessarily attacking the methodology. They’re probing. They want to know whether the framework is rigid or adaptive. Whether it accounts for the complexity they navigate every day. Whether it sees them.
The answer isn’t a formula. The answer is a question back:
The score emerged from tracking over 180 implementations across 27 years. But I’m less interested in defending a number than in asking: does the capability–outcome gap we’re seeing resonate with your experience?
That does three things simultaneously. It de-escalates. It invites participation. And it preserves authority — not through assertion, but through demonstrated willingness to be challenged.
If the SAP consultant in the room thinks, he understands the pressure we’re under — the session works.
If they think, he’s attacking the ecosystem — it doesn’t.
The data is not anti-SAP. The 7.5 Technology Capability score proves that. What the data reveals is structural: the gap between what the platform can do and what organizations actually achieve has widened to 4.7 points. That’s not a vendor problem. It’s a readiness problem. And readiness is something every person in that room can act on.
I Am Not Creating a Cookbook
This is the point I want to make clearly, because it shapes everything about how the briefing will be conducted.
I am not selling a deterministic algorithm. I am not presenting a compliance checklist. I am not offering a magic number that predicts everything.
I am challenging those who attend to stretch their boundaries — regarding how they think about solution selection, implementation methodology, and what it actually takes to achieve sustainable outcomes.
The Hansen Fit Score is a longitudinal pattern-recognition framework. It emerged from evidence, not from theory. It has remained consistent across the ERP era, the suite era, and now the AI era — not because it’s rigid, but because the structural relationships between capability, governance, outcomes, implementation model, and readiness don’t change when the technology label changes.
Rigid models break under complexity. Elastic frameworks endure across eras.
That’s why longevity matters more than precision.
The Energy in the Room
When I stand in front of a room — whether it was a nationwide PMAC lecture series between 2008 and 2011 or a virtual briefing on SAP Ariba in 2026 — the posture is the same:
Curious. Calm. Grounded. Inviting.
Not defensive. Not combative. Not evangelical.
I don’t promote the latest flavour. I surface complexity. I give professionals language to articulate what they already sense but haven’t been given permission to say out loud.
The capability–outcome gap isn’t news to most practitioners. They live it. What they haven’t had is a framework that quantifies it, names it, and traces it across 18 years of documented evidence.
That’s what the briefing provides.
Not answers. Not prescriptions. Not a cookbook.
A structured space to examine whether the patterns hold — and what to do about it if they do.
The SAP Ariba Executive Briefing — “The $4.3 Billion Question: What the 18-Year Data Actually Shows” — is a 30-minute live session with Q&A. Details and registration at Procurement Insights.
The full 14-page consolidated assessment is available through the Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series.
-30-
If you are live on SAP Ariba, mid-migration, or defending ROI in 2026, this executive briefing is designed for you.
Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at 11:00 AM ET – Executive Briefing Access
- $195 – Individual seat
- $395 – Three-person group pass
Attendance fee may be applied as a credit toward purchase of the full 14-page consolidated assessment report. A credit code will be provided at the conclusion of the session.
Reserve your seat here: Individual Seat: Single Seat, Three-Person Pass: Three Person
Procurement Insights
This Is Not a Cookbook: Why the SAP Ariba Briefing Won’t Look Like Anything You’ve Attended Before
Posted on February 12, 2026
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Procurement Insights | Jon Hansen | February 2026
I’ve been preparing for the upcoming executive briefing on the SAP Ariba consolidated assessment — the one built on 233 articles, 18 years of evidence, and the three-phase Hansen Fit Score™ methodology. As part of that preparation, I’ve been stress-testing the Q&A scenarios with my AI advisory team.
One of the models asked me to prepare “defensible” 30-second answers to the fifteen most likely audience questions.
I stopped it.
Not because the answers were wrong. They were actually quite good. But because the word defensible revealed a posture I have no intention of adopting.
The Question That Changed the Prep
The first question on the list was straightforward: How exactly is the Hansen Fit Score calculated?
The model drafted a clean, structured answer. Lead with credibility. Name the five dimensions. Explain the elasticity. Keep it tight. Make it defensible in 30 seconds.
I pushed back. Not on the content — on the framing.
Why do we need to defend anything within 30 seconds? I don’t want to defend. I want to engage. I want to be challenged to establish mutual understanding despite our different backgrounds. This is not a cookie-cutter model.
That distinction matters more than any score I’ll present on screen.
Defense Narrows. Engagement Elevates.
When you enter a room in defense mode, you narrow the exchange. You’re bracing for attack. You’re optimizing for survival. Every question becomes a threat to manage.
When you enter in engagement mode, you elevate the room. You’re inviting inquiry. You’re creating space for practitioners — people who live inside these implementations every day — to compare their lived experience against longitudinal evidence.
Those are fundamentally different intellectual postures.
A cookie-cutter model says: This score predicts everything.
The Hansen Fit Score says: Across 27 years and more than 180 implementations, structural alignment patterns repeat. Let’s examine them together.
That’s not a pitch. It’s an invitation.
What 2008 Taught Me About 2026
I’ve been doing this a long time. Long enough that the testimonials from my early seminar work tell a story that still applies.
Adam Cooper, who was at Canadian Tire in 2008 and is now CTO of McDonald’s Canada, described what happened in the room: “Jon had a very creative and engaging way of presenting the seminar material. The class fed off his energy which made for very interesting discussions and he was able to play on the class’s wide range of experience and employers.”
Sal Nazarali, a global procurement and supply chain executive, captured the substance: “Jon made it clear that the Supply Chain industry is much more complex and generalizations are a thing of the past. He described multiple ways for Supply Chain Professionals to express the necessary changes needed… Overall his seminar was very informative, interactive and armed the attendees to go back to their existing roles at work to pursue Supply Chain excellence.”
And Dianne Mowat, from Inergi, identified what made the approach different: “I was quite surprised that he didn’t promote the latest flavour of procurement… instead he asked us to use common-sense and not allow technology to define our business process… how refreshing!”
Three testimonials from three different professionals. Same pattern: interactive, grounded, anti-dogma.
Not selling. Surfacing.
Not lecturing. Inviting.
Not promoting flavour-of-the-month. Provoking thoughtful discomfort.
What This Means for the SAP Ariba Briefing
When someone in the briefing asks how the score is calculated, they’re not necessarily attacking the methodology. They’re probing. They want to know whether the framework is rigid or adaptive. Whether it accounts for the complexity they navigate every day. Whether it sees them.
The answer isn’t a formula. The answer is a question back:
The score emerged from tracking over 180 implementations across 27 years. But I’m less interested in defending a number than in asking: does the capability–outcome gap we’re seeing resonate with your experience?
That does three things simultaneously. It de-escalates. It invites participation. And it preserves authority — not through assertion, but through demonstrated willingness to be challenged.
If the SAP consultant in the room thinks, he understands the pressure we’re under — the session works.
If they think, he’s attacking the ecosystem — it doesn’t.
The data is not anti-SAP. The 7.5 Technology Capability score proves that. What the data reveals is structural: the gap between what the platform can do and what organizations actually achieve has widened to 4.7 points. That’s not a vendor problem. It’s a readiness problem. And readiness is something every person in that room can act on.
I Am Not Creating a Cookbook
This is the point I want to make clearly, because it shapes everything about how the briefing will be conducted.
I am not selling a deterministic algorithm. I am not presenting a compliance checklist. I am not offering a magic number that predicts everything.
I am challenging those who attend to stretch their boundaries — regarding how they think about solution selection, implementation methodology, and what it actually takes to achieve sustainable outcomes.
The Hansen Fit Score is a longitudinal pattern-recognition framework. It emerged from evidence, not from theory. It has remained consistent across the ERP era, the suite era, and now the AI era — not because it’s rigid, but because the structural relationships between capability, governance, outcomes, implementation model, and readiness don’t change when the technology label changes.
Rigid models break under complexity. Elastic frameworks endure across eras.
That’s why longevity matters more than precision.
The Energy in the Room
When I stand in front of a room — whether it was a nationwide PMAC lecture series between 2008 and 2011 or a virtual briefing on SAP Ariba in 2026 — the posture is the same:
Curious. Calm. Grounded. Inviting.
Not defensive. Not combative. Not evangelical.
I don’t promote the latest flavour. I surface complexity. I give professionals language to articulate what they already sense but haven’t been given permission to say out loud.
The capability–outcome gap isn’t news to most practitioners. They live it. What they haven’t had is a framework that quantifies it, names it, and traces it across 18 years of documented evidence.
That’s what the briefing provides.
Not answers. Not prescriptions. Not a cookbook.
A structured space to examine whether the patterns hold — and what to do about it if they do.
The SAP Ariba Executive Briefing — “The $4.3 Billion Question: What the 18-Year Data Actually Shows” — is a 30-minute live session with Q&A. Details and registration at Procurement Insights.
The full 14-page consolidated assessment is available through the Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series.
-30-
If you are live on SAP Ariba, mid-migration, or defending ROI in 2026, this executive briefing is designed for you.
Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at 11:00 AM ET – Executive Briefing Access
Attendance fee may be applied as a credit toward purchase of the full 14-page consolidated assessment report. A credit code will be provided at the conclusion of the session.
Reserve your seat here: Individual Seat: Single Seat, Three-Person Pass: Three Person
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