Before more change requests pile up against your SAP® RE-FX system.

A migration nobody validated afterwards. A reorganisation that moved properties to a new entity but not cleanly. A regulatory change pushed through under time pressure and never reviewed. A merger of two public entities that left two parallel object hierarchies in place. None of these are bugs. All of them leave residue — small inconsistencies that compound silently until someone notices a number that does not tie, a property that appears in two places, or an obligation that should have expired but is still posting.

The posting run finishes and I wait — not for errors, but to see how many. A handful of contracts never post correctly. I gave up trying to fix the root cause years ago. I keep a personal list instead. Finance calls and asks why the lease liability on building 4 shifted between two periods. Sometimes I find the reason. Sometimes I close the ticket with “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

I am responsible for a portfolio of several hundred properties across multiple legal entities. Budget commitments are tracked against it. Audit reports refer to it. Political stakeholders ask questions about it. The system is supposed to give me one view of the truth. In practice it gives me one view, and a spreadsheet next to it where I reconcile what the system cannot. I know this is not sustainable. Whoever inherits this seat after me will inherit the spreadsheet too.

The portfolio touches five systems. LUM holds the land data, RE-FX holds the contracts, CAFM holds the operational view, GIS holds the geometry, Finance holds the postings. Each interface synchronises something — but never quite everything, and never quite at the same time.

The numbers change slightly every month. A few hundred euros on a lease liability. A square metre discrepancy between LUM and RE-FX that nobody can explain. I asked once. Someone on a forum replied with a note number. I applied it. The changes kept happening. I assumed it was correct. There are objects in the configuration nobody has touched because they were there when we arrived — a custom condition type called “Z_ADJ_something”, a mapping table nobody maintains, a reconciliation job whose log nobody opens.

When the auditor asks whether the portfolio data is complete and accurate, I say yes. I say it with conviction. What I can actually confirm is narrower: it is produced the same way it was last year — across the same interfaces, with the same exceptions, by the same people.

There are screens I never open. Reports I never run. Not because they are irrelevant, but because the last time someone touched them, something broke that took us three weeks to trace. I know which transactions are safe. Everything outside that perimeter feels expensive.

When someone proposes a change — consolidating cost centres, moving properties into a new entity, activating a new disclosure report — my first reaction is defensive. How many interfaces does that touch? Which mappings are hard-coded somewhere I cannot see? What will it break in LUM, in CAFM, in the consolidation? I usually answer with “let’s park that for now.” I cannot frame what I suspect clearly enough to escalate without sounding like I do not know my own portfolio. So I swallow it.

If someone asked me to walk through the system end-to-end, I could give the high-level tour. If they started drilling — why this property sits under that entity, why this lease uses that condition type, why this number ties to LUM but not to Finance — I would run out of answers fast.

At some point I stopped asking whether the system is really right and started optimising for getting through the budget cycle. Admitting that something fundamental might be off feels like opening a door I cannot close again — internal audits, oversight committees, political questions, restatement of public figures, expectations I do not have the bandwidth to carry. So as long as the numbers do not look obviously absurd, they are good enough.

Meanwhile RE-FX and I grow around each other. My routines, my spreadsheets, my unwritten rules wrap themselves around its quirks. The strange things become “just how we do it here.” Half the workarounds are not documented because I remember them. Odd results are not challenged because I have internalised the explanation. I am the missing manual — and in a public entity, where staff turnover, retirements and reorganisations are routine, that is its own kind of risk.

The cost of real change quietly explodes. Fixing the system would mean not only touching SAP, but unpicking years of tacit knowledge and unwinding the personal logic I have built on top. The system is not just complex anymore — it is personal. It runs on my memory, my judgement, my presence. And one day, on my succession.