A fixed-price proposal for a BW-to-Snowflake migration is in front of the client. The numbers work — on the assumptions in the spreadsheet. Then, three weeks into delivery, the team discovers the client's custom ABAP volume is forty per cent higher than estimated. Without an accelerator, that is a margin problem, and it is the partner's margin that absorbs it. With Forge, it is a managed risk — because the landscape assessment produced the actual complexity score before the proposal was ever issued.
Fixed-price BW migration work is under real commercial pressure: ABAP specialist day rates rising as the talent pool contracts, clients pushing on timelines, and estate complexity that consistently exceeds estimates. Forge gives system-integrator partners an accelerator that compresses delivery by 75–80% across four engagement tiers, reduces specialist dependency, and — most importantly for a delivery director — changes the economics of fixed-price programmes by removing the guesswork they are priced on.
The information asymmetry that eats fixed-price margin
The variables that decide whether a fixed-price BW engagement is profitable — ABAP volume, object complexity, data quality — are precisely the ones that are unknown until the programme is already underway. Proposals get built on estimates, the estimates frequently prove optimistic, and the overrun lands on the partner's margin rather than the client's budget.
Forge resolves that asymmetry by moving the discovery before the commitment. The two-week landscape assessment — a fixed fee, delivered independently of any downstream engagement — produces the actual complexity score before the migration proposal is issued. Every Forge migration proposal is issued after the assessment, with the tier confirmed by the score.
Partners who use Forge propose on evidence, not assumptions — pricing the risk they can see, instead of absorbing the risk they couldn't.
Four tiers, one consistent saving
Forge's engagement model scales with the estate, and the 75–80% time saving holds across all four tiers. That consistency is what makes the commercial case predictable rather than anecdotal.
There is a compounding effect on top of the per-engagement saving. The pre-built Finance, Sales and Supply Chain data-model templates carry across clients: each template validated for client one is available for client two at zero additional build cost. A partner's second BW engagement is structurally more profitable than its first.
Three ways to partner — and who owns what
Forge supports three partnership structures. The referral model is for partners sourcing and introducing BW migration opportunities. The co-delivery model is for partners delivering alongside Jarvis on Large or XL engagements. The reseller model is for partners including Forge tooling within their own service offering.
The IP boundaries are deliberately clean: client-specific configurations belong to the client; the Forge tooling and templates are Jarvis IP; and the partner's delivery methodology remains the partner's IP. Forge is tooling designed to sit alongside and accelerate any structured migration approach — it does not compete with a partner's methodology, it makes that methodology faster and cheaper to execute.
Qualifying the right first engagement
The ICP for partners is specific: an organisation with a BW estate of 50+ InfoCubes, a 2027 maintenance deadline creating urgency and CFO sponsorship, and a programme sponsor who has not yet been presented with a credible, costed migration decision. That last point is where Forge opens the conversation.
The five-minute readiness check at jarvisbusiness.io/bw-assessment.html is built for partners to use in initial prospect conversations — it surfaces estate size, confirms BW is in scope, and generates the input for an assessment SOW issued within 24 hours of a discovery call. The two-week assessment then begins: RFC connection, automated scanning, stakeholder interviews, and seven deliverables. The findings are presented to the CFO and programme sponsor, and the fixed-price migration proposal is issued at the same readout, tier confirmed by the complexity score. The partner sells the certainty, not just the speed.
Propose on evidence, not assumptions
The five-minute readiness check is built for partners to use in prospect conversations — it surfaces estate size, confirms BW is in scope, and generates the input for an assessment SOW issued within 24 hours of a discovery call.
Start with the readiness check