Six months after their Extended ECM go-live, the operations team at a global manufacturer gathered for what should have been a routine performance review. The system was stable, users were trained, and tickets were down. Yet something wasn’t right. They noticed that adoption had plateaued. People were still saving critical files on shared drives, workflows weren’t expanding, and executives weren’t seeing the promised ROI.
The system hadn’t failed. It just wasn’t growing.
This scene plays out more often than most leaders realize. Companies invest heavily in SAP and OpenText Extended ECM, expecting efficiency and transformation. But after implementation, many teams find themselves caught between two competing forces: the need to stabilize and the desire to innovate.
In most cases, the bottleneck isn’t the software itself. It's the staffing model supporting it. Teams are often built to deliver go-live, not to sustain continuous improvement. Administrators handle maintenance, but innovation requires specialized skills that go beyond daily operations. The result is a silent stall: the system works, but the business doesn’t advance.
When this happens, small inefficiencies start to pile up. Finance teams duplicate reports to double-check figures. Engineers resend drawings that already exist. Compliance teams spend hours chasing documentation for audits.
Over time, these micro-delays add up to lost trust. End users stop believing the system will give them what they need, so they turn to their own workarounds. Once that happens, the ROI you expected quietly slips away.
The organizations that break through this plateau recognize that Extended ECM isn’t a one-time project. It’s a living platform that evolves as the business does. To keep that evolution alive, they invest in people. The right roles, the right expertise, and the right structure to scale.
They treat staffing as a maturity journey. Early on, they bring in specialized experts to stabilize performance and coach internal teams. Over time, they rebalance responsibilities, building internal capability while still accessing external insight as needed. It’s not about outsourcing — it’s about orchestrating talent to create resilience.
At Qellus, we see this every day. Our Extended ECM staffing services help organizations bridge the gap between stability and growth. We embed seasoned OpenText and SAP professionals directly within client teams. People who understand not only the technology but also the business processes that run on top of it.
These experts identify where the system is underperforming, where adoption is lagging, and where automation could deliver measurable ROI. They help you build the right balance of internal ownership and external expertise, ensuring that knowledge transfer happens along the way.
One global oil and gas company came to us after realizing that their ECM system, though functional, had stopped evolving. Ticket queues were long, adoption was slipping, and audits were becoming painful. Within a few months, our embedded experts had stabilized the environment, trained internal leads, and restructured support workflows. Backlog dropped by 60%, and the system became trusted again.
With that foundation in place, innovation followed naturally. The same team began automating compliance reports, integrating ECM with additional SAP modules, and launching new document-centric workflows. ROI wasn’t just recovered, it multiplied.
The most successful CIOs and IT directors share a simple philosophy: technology is only as effective as the people who manage it. Systems don’t transform organizations; people do.
That’s why top-performing enterprises benchmark their staffing models regularly, not to find fault, but to find opportunity. They ask: Do we have the right roles for the next phase of growth? Where are our expertise gaps? How do we stay agile without overhiring?
Your staffing strategy should evolve as your system does. In early stages, ad-hoc experts can accelerate optimization. As maturity grows, managed services can sustain long-term performance. For organizations looking for full flexibility, our xECM Expert Services and Managed Services provide options that scale with your needs.
These models eliminate hiring delays and fixed costs while ensuring you always have access to proven expertise. More importantly, they protect your investment by preventing technical debt, compliance gaps, and user fatigue.
Every quarter you wait to optimize your staffing model is a quarter of unrealized ROI. The longer the system stays static, the harder it becomes to rebuild business trust. But with a clear roadmap, progress can happen faster than most expect.
That’s why we created the Extended ECM Staffing Assessment. In two consultant-led sessions, we benchmark your current approach against proven best practices from industry leaders. You’ll see exactly where your strengths and gaps lie, and leave with a practical roadmap to accelerate value.
Your SAP and OpenText investments have already been made. The infrastructure is in place. The opportunity now lies in how effectively your team can harness it.
With the right staffing model, you can turn a stable system into a source of continuous innovation — one that keeps delivering measurable ROI, year after year.
If your ECM story feels stuck between maintenance and momentum, now’s the time to see what’s possible.
Start with a complimentary xECM Staffing Assessment, and find out how top-performing organizations keep their transformation moving forward.
“Do we have the right skill mix to stabilize and scale Extended ECM?”
“How do leading organizations staff their ECM teams post-implementation?”
“What risks do we face if we don’t have the right expertise in place?”
“How do we balance stabilization with innovation?”
“How do we ensure our ECM investment achieves expected ROI?”