If you need a consultancy that specializes in SAP and OpenText process automation, look for one that works every day on the OpenText products that live inside SAP: VIM for invoices, Extended ECM for business workspaces, Core Capture for extraction, and Core Archive or Archiving and Document Access for storage. McCloy Data is one of them. That's our practice, together with SAP data archiving. The seven questions below are the ones we'd want a client to put to us, and they work for any partner.
1. Do they know your dates, and where the dates come from? This Sunday, 1 November 2026, Current Maintenance ends for three OpenText for SAP 21.4 releases: Archiving and Document Access, Core Archive and Extended ECM for SAP. VIM 7.6 and 20.4 follow on 31 December 2027. A partner who knows the portfolio names the dates that apply to your landscape and points to OpenText's lifecycle page as the source. We keep ours on a public maintenance calendar, and we wrote up the 21.4 dates earlier this month.
2. Do they start from the SAP release? OpenText's SAP products follow SAP. SAP Note 3654390, as cited on SAP Community, pairs S/4HANA 2025 with VIM 25.4. A good first meeting asks which S/4HANA or ECC release you run and which one you're heading to, before it talks about any OpenText version.
3. How do they keep the core clean? OpenText's SAP products are SAP add-ons with their own configuration. VIM's lives in two trees, /OTX/PF00_IMG for Foundation and /OPT/SPRO for the invoice rules. Ask a partner to show you what they configure there, what they'd build outside it and why, and whether they'll hand over a list of every custom object they leave behind. The shorter that list, the easier your next upgrade.
4. How do they work with OpenText support? A software defect belongs in a support case with OpenText. A design question belongs with your partner. Ask how they decide which is which, and who opens the case. Mixing the two is a quiet way to lose weeks.
5. Do they read release notes, or brochures? Much of what changes a recommendation is in release notes and advisories. One example: OpenText says Core Capture for SAP 26.2's GenAI extraction can be activated without a mandatory VIM upgrade for every VIM release from 7.6 on. A partner who knows that can keep an extraction change apart from an upgrade. Ask for one recent advisory or release note that changed advice they gave.
6. Who owns it after go-live? Process automation keeps changing after the project closes: business rules, approval limits, document types, archive paths. Ask how ownership is handed over. You want a written list of who may change what, and knowledge transfer your own team can run without the partner in the room. Landscapes drift; that's why we run a VIM health check. A good partner plans for drift from day one.
7. Will they tell you not to do something? The best sign is a partner who says no: to an upgrade you don't need yet, to an AI feature nobody owns, to custom code where configuration would do. Ask for an example.
Seven answers on one page will tell you more than a slide deck.
