Fonterra is replacing its core ERP systems with SAP S/4HANA in a program expected to cost NZ$450–500 million (about US$260–290 million) over six years. In its FY26 results, released in September, the dairy cooperative said the program is on track and on budget.
Nainesh Golchha, Head of SAP Build and Configuration at Fonterra, has given SAP Joule for Consultants to more than 100 people working on the program. “This isn’t a pilot; it’s the tool in the hands of a working delivery organization,” he said.
Golchha, a Chartered Accountant with 25-plus years in SAP consulting and management, will share Fonterra’s lessons in a session at Mastering SAP Collaborate 2026 on Wednesday, November 18 in Sydney. His assessment of the tool is favorable and frank.
“For a program of any real size, this is genuinely different,” he said, while acknowledging that skeptics are “right about more than the vendor would like.”
Where Joule for Consultants Earns Its Place
Golchha said the tool is strongest “wherever the bottleneck is SAP knowledge rather than typing.”
Months after the new system went live, Fonterra had roughly 2,000 support incidents on the board. Finding their common causes would have taken 15 of the program’s consultants more than a day in a room, he said, “and they’d still be arguing at the end of it.”
Joule for Consultants sorted the incidents under eight root causes across four workstreams and explained each link. Stream owners, who “would have loved to catch the AI being wrong,” confirmed the findings. “The surprise isn’t cleverness; it’s the ability to consider everything at once and run analysis we could never previously afford,” Golchha said.
He called solutioning “the underestimated one.” Given a user story with real context, the tool lays out viable options, checks each for clean-core impact and fit to standard, and recommends one. That recommendation email, he said, “is the hardest one any consultant writes, and it normally takes years of experience to write well.”
Results depend on what users supply. “Give it context and direction and the output is remarkable. Give it neither and you get confident mediocrity,” he said.
How Fonterra Directs and Checks the Output
Golchha checks AI output the way he learned to check accounts as a Chartered Accountant. “An auditor never accepts a number because it looks right; you ask to see the working and trace it to source,” he said.
Fonterra asks the tool for answers plus reasoning, checks the reasoning, and scales scrutiny to the risk of each deliverable. Users also make it play back what it understood before it proposes anything.
Left alone, the tool “agrees with you by default,” he said.
One consultant drafted an ECC-style design even though uploaded landscape documents showed Fonterra had event mesh live. The tool raised event mesh only when asked to “challenge our thinking,” and the architect reworked the design. “Disagreement has to be requested. Build that into your design review,” Golchha said.
The tool also hallucinates, “and it does so fluently,” he said, most often with BAPIs, APIs, and the newest modules. Every technical session ends with a prompt asking it to recheck each technical object it suggested against what exists in Fonterra’s version.
Golchha said these habits keep the real-world impact of errors low because people stay in charge: “We direct it, we verify it, and we own what goes out the door.”
The Gaps He Wants SAP to Close
Golchha called doubts about whether the tool understands a company’s own system “the sharpest criticism and the most valid.”
He explained: “It knows SAP. It does not know your SAP — your configuration, your custom objects, your decisions.” Grounding the tool on company documents creates a snapshot that ages, producing “a confidently wrong answer citing your own documents, which is worse, because you trust it.”
Fonterra pairs it with Microsoft Copilot and SharePoint, which hold the project’s emails, meetings, and decisions, under one rule: “Ask SAP questions where SAP knowledge lives; create your documents where your documents live.”
The catch, he said, is that “these tools are islands, so the human becomes the integration layer.” He named that as “the single thing I’d most want SAP to fix.”
He has also pressed for visibility into individual usage, which Fonterra needs to manage spend and show value. Even so, he called the criticism “the smaller half of the story.”
Across Fonterra’s 11 teams and five project phases, the tool reviews documentation across streams and challenges design decisions. “At the scale of a major SAP program, those are things you cannot do with people alone, however good they are,” he said.
What Adoption Takes
Golchha said “the license is the cheap part”; the real investment is an experienced person devoted to adoption who “has done the hard yards personally.”
At Fonterra, that meant a 74-page guide he wrote and taught page by page, a community of practice that meets every two weeks, and one-on-one coaching for every license issued.
“The best sign of health is that members now teach each other,” he said.
He expects the bigger change to come in the work itself. “Faster is the least interesting part,” he said. “Less of your value is in producing the artifact; more of it is in directing, challenging and owning it.”
His bottom line: “The output is a proposal, not a product. Someone with judgment and accountability has to direct it.”
Golchha will cover where Joule for Consultants delivers value, where Microsoft Copilot fills the gaps, and where people remain essential in his Mastering SAP Collaborate 2026 session in Sydney on November 18.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Build verification into how work is accepted. Ask AI tools to show their reasoning, scale review to each deliverable’s risk, and close technical sessions with a check that every suggested object exists. Teams that do this get output they can defend to stakeholders and auditors.
Route each question to the tool that knows it. Joule for Consultants knows SAP, while tools such as Microsoft Copilot know the project’s documents and decisions. Deciding which questions go where, and who carries context between tools, means fewer confidently wrong answers.
Put a senior SAP practitioner in charge of adoption. At Fonterra, an experienced SAP leader learned the tool on live project work, then wrote the guide, ran the community, and coached every user. That credibility wins over skeptics and shortens the path from licenses issued to work delivered.
This article was first published by SAPinsider.
