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UST has acquired Taciti Consulting, a firm that helps asset-heavy companies such as manufacturers deploy SAP software.

The transaction terms were not disclosed. Boardroom Insight caught up with executives from UST and SAP to get a closer look at the software products driving the deal. 

SAP’s flagship product is an ERP platform that organizations use as a centralized repository of business information. Customers often extend the software with custom code. A retailer might create dashboards that track inventory levels across its warehouses, while a bank can add an integration with its regulatory compliance system. Firms often bring in technology consultancies such as UST to build such customizations.

Taciti Consulting, the firm that UST has bought, employs more than 240 workers in the US and India. Those professionals help companies in technical, asset-heavy sectors to set up SAP products. Taciti is active in the utilities segment and several parts of the manufacturing sector, most notably the semiconductor market. Its customers in the latter vertical include an unnamed global supplier of chipmaking equipment and related refurbishment services. There’s a sizable market for refurbished hardware in the semiconductor sector because brand new transistor fabrication machines can cost more than $300 million. 

SAP consulting projects in such industries are “significantly more complex than traditional ERP implementations,” UST chief solutions officer Kailash Attal told Boardroom Insight. He explained that SAP-powered “semiconductor and other engineer-to-order manufacturing environments require deep expertise across highly customized production processes, complex supply chain networks, product traceability, quality management, as well as tight integration between engineering, manufacturing, logistics, and customer fulfillment systems.”

One of Taciti’s main focus areas is upgrading customers to S/4HANA, SAP’s flagship ERP system, from legacy products. S/4HANA was released in 2015 as the successor to an earlier SAP platform called ECC that is mainly designed for on-premise use. The former application, in contrast, is optimized to run in the cloud, which removes the need for customers to manage the underlying hardware. SAP says that moving to the latest version of its ERP platform also provides other benefits.

“It’s about giving manufacturers, including semiconductor companies, a fundamentally more responsive and intelligent digital core,” Maura Hameroff, SAP’s senior vice president of cloud ERP product marketing and the CMO of RISE with SAP, told Boardroom Insight. “In our experience, these industries are managing highly complex supply chains, long production cycles, and constant pressure to innovate. SAP Cloud ERP solutions enable real-time visibility across planning, production, and logistics, so business leaders can make faster, more informed decisions and respond quickly to changing demand or disruptions.”

One of the main challenges involved in moving to S/4HANA is that some companies’ legacy ERP environments have decades worth of customizations. Moving those modifications to the cloud can require significant code changes. The task is particularly complicated in the manufacturing sector, where companies often customize their ERP environments to a greater degree than firms with simpler supply chains. 

“Unlike more standardized SAP deployments, these industries demand a strong understanding of order management, plant operations, manufacturing execution, variant configuration, global sourcing constraints, and long product development and production cycles,” UST’s Attal explained.

SAP says that S/4HANA can help companies simplify key logistics and production processes. “For semiconductor firms specifically, the value comes from managing that complexity at scale,” Hameroff said. “That includes improving transparency, optimizing inventory and costs and supporting global operations.” Semiconductor equipment suppliers often have supply chains that span multiple countries. Netherlands-based ASML, for example, relies on a German firm called Zeiss to make key components of its bus-size transistor etching machines.

S/4HANA rollouts often involve a SAP product called SAP Business Technology Platform, or BTP. It’s a software toolkit that companies can use to integrate their ERP environments with external business applications. Such integrations automate manual tasks such as syncing business data across systems. 

Hameroff explained that BTP “serves as the innovation layer for SAP Cloud ERP solutions, enabling customers to integrate SAP and non-SAP systems, incorporate SAP and external data, build and extend applications or capabilities, and accelerate business transformation with AI — without disrupting the stability of the core ERP system.”

UST says that maintaining ERP system stability is one of Taciti’s specialties. The latter firm provides so-called clean core development services, which means that it implements ERP customizations in a form that reduces the risk of bugs and eases code maintenance. Taciti’s services portfolio also extends beyond the initial ERP deployment phase. It provides managed cybersecurity services that help customers protect their SAP environments on an ongoing basis. 

The acquisition “strengthens UST because Taciti has demonstrated the ability to help clients modernize complex environments while balancing operational continuity, clean core strategies, and SAP S/4HANA transformation goals,” Attal said. “Their deep domain expertise, combined with UST’s global scale, engineering capabilities, and automation-led delivery approach, creates a strong platform to support large-scale transformation initiatives.”

Photo courtesy of SAP