Engineering Trust at Scale: How Proactive Governance and Operational Health Reviews Achieved Zero Service Credits for Mission-Critical SAP Customers

Abstract

For two decades, the management of mission-critical SAP landscapes has been bifurcated by a fundamental epistemic fracture: the sociological definition of trust as a function of vulnerability versus the engineering imperative to eliminate that vulnerability entirely. Current industry standards attempt to paper over this silence with the Service Level Agreement (SLA), a reactive instrument that essentially monetizes failure through the “archaeology” of post-mortem analysis rather than preventing the trajectory of the crash. To resolve this decoupling, this study details a twenty-four-month longitudinal intervention utilizing a Proactive Governance framework known as the Operational Health Review (OHR), which shifts the audit mechanism upstream to interrogate system conditions before incidents coalesce. The results demonstrate that by introducing deliberate friction into the release cycle, organizations can decouple operational complexity from risk, achieving a sustained state of “Zero Service Credits” an economic surplus of reliability where penalty payouts cease entirely. This transition suggests that the “inevitability” of downtime is a symptom of governance rather than software entropy, effectively challenging the “fail fast” orthodoxy of modern IT operations. Ultimately, this research redefines the semantics of “zero” from a deficit to an asset, arguing that in mission-critical contexts, the objective is not to cultivate trust, but to render it obsolete through the structural guarantee of continuity.