Kingfisher says “no” to SAP S/4HANA. But look closer and the story changes. This is not a rejection of SAP at all. It is a confrontation with the limits of organisational maturity: processes, data, extensibility and governance.
Kingfisher is not an incident.It is a signal.
It shows that the classical ERP implementation logic — one system, one truth, one roadmap — structurally clashes with the scale, diversity and change pressure of modern multinationals.
The problem is not SAP.
The problem is how we still implement ERP.
As if one standard could fit organisations in the same sector, while each country and market operates under different rules.
This does not require a tighter blueprint.
It requires an architecture that facilitates instead of forces.
An architecture that can carry variation without breaking the organisation.
This is the point: it is not about ERP, it is about architecture.
Clean Core is often presented as the solution: less customisation, more standardisation, but it is more than that.
Clean Core combines technology and governance and creates a framework in which variation can exist in a controlled way.
Without composable, Clean Core becomes a constraint.
With composable, Clean Core becomes a strategy.
That is when it becomes clear why “composable” is not a hype, but a deliberate design choice in a landscape that would otherwise grind to a halt.
And then Kingfisher.
This is where nuance matters.
Chris Blatchford told SAP they were too expensive and that he wanted to see the value SAP would deliver for that price.
But what is striking is that this goes public after Kingfisher had already committed to a composable route two years earlier:
- Optimizely: DXP
- Fluent Commerce: OMS
- Google Cloud: data, AI, ML
- Databricks: analytics, ML
- Conversational bots: outside SAP
What remains are the classical modules: WMS, sales, procurement, planning.
However, the strategic choice has already been made.
Variation has been moved outside SAP.
The core has already been relieved.
So when Blatchford now says SAP is too expensive, it does not feel like a negotiation, more like a rationalisation after the fact.
Kingfisher does not prove that SAP is falling short.
Kingfisher proves that Clean Core cannot exist without composable.
And it shows that organisations for which variation is a structural reality — whether they say it out loud or not — must organise their landscape outside the core if they want to move forward at all.
Not because they are so mature.
Not because they are so strategic.
But because the reality of their business forces them to.
Composable is not a hype.
It is the architecture that prevents Clean Core from becoming polluted again.
This is an architectural choice that becomes inevitable the moment you stop fooling yourself.
And yes, composable is level D of the SAP Clean Core Extensibility Framework.
