AMS vs In-house Support: What Actually Costs More?

Comparing an AMS quote against your internal support team's salaries is the most common way to get this decision wrong. The salary line is the visible part; the true comparison is between two very different cost structures.

The costs that hide inside "in-house"

• Coverage math: one person per module cannot take leave, get sick or resign without creating a single point of failure. Real coverage of, say, FI/CO, MM/SD and ABAP requires 5–7 people even at modest ticket volumes.
• The firefighting tax: internal teams sized for average load get crushed at month-end and year-end close — and the overflow lands on your best people, who are also trying to deliver projects.
• Knowledge decay: when the one person who knows the pricing routine leaves, the replacement's first six months are effectively a paid archaeology dig.
• Recruitment drag: every departure costs 2–4 months of search plus onboarding — during which SLAs quietly stop existing.

What a managed service actually changes

AMS is not "cheaper people" — rates per hour are often similar. What changes is the structure: pooled coverage across modules, contractual SLAs that survive personnel changes, a change-request pipeline with estimation discipline, and monthly reporting that turns support from a black box into a managed service. You are buying the system, not the seats.

When in-house genuinely wins

Keep support internal when SAP is close to your competitive core, ticket volumes are high and stable enough to keep a full bench busy, and you can realistically retain 6+ specialists. Plenty of large enterprises meet that bar. Most mid-sized ones do not — and pay the hidden costs above without seeing them on any invoice.

A fair way to compare

Price the in-house option honestly: salaries × 1.35 for on-costs, plus recruitment amortization, plus the opportunity cost of project people covering tickets. Then compare against an AMS tier with equivalent coverage hours. We are happy to walk through that model with your numbers — our support team has run this service since 2022, and the math is less scary in a spreadsheet than in a vendor pitch.