This list would probably become endless:
1) The biggest "status quo"-defending organization I have ever seen. Oldest employees are the worse cancer for the subsidiary. Resistance to change, comes directly from them, as they're the less prepared for the business shift all SAP's acquisitions mean and demand, as the company moves from selling only ERP, to selling business-impacting value.
2) Many sales and support-areas managers are not really skilled to execute their jobs. The biggest personal assets there are your abilities to socialize with the senior management, and integrate to the "core power group". It's amazing to see some of their profiles and find some directors have almost no previous valuable experience!
3) No strategy in place whatsoever. Even in the toughest industries, sales quotas are determined by a local "board of directors", that have no clue of the true opportunity the market has to offer and that is right in front of their noses. Amazing.
4) Lots of useless global organizations, full of useless people. Globals know that many subsidiaries are a "mess", so they stick to travel and doing presentations, but don't really get involved. "Business development" areas in between the sales teams and the valuable technical areas, are also not adding a lot of value, especially when they're composed of people from different nationalities, who lack a proper way to engage with customers from specific regions like LATAM.
5) All of the above has created a subisiary that works, above everything else, ruled by a very strong "law of the minimum effort". People knows things won't change, so they don't even bother. Most of the people that has been there for more than 5 years, want to be promoted just because directors really do nothing (even when they do a lot of effort to appear to be "tirelessly working). Lots of long meetings, events, and so on, but with very little to no value for the customers at all.
6) Focus over the industries where SAP has been successful locally in the past. Basically, Oil & Gas, Consumer Products and Retail, nothing else matters, because the team's lack of knowledge and what is worse, the will to get to know and understand other challenging industries that could represent TONS of revenue, prevents them to develop a proper go-to-market.
