I've used some SAP-based solutions a few times and the closest experience I can relate it to is late 90s MS Access applications: Everything takes ages. Things that should be easy and quick (e.g. viewing a related record or item) are often difficult and take time. Every form of search function doesn't really work, even with perfect input data. Searching doesn't work if your input is slightly off (e.g. names in wrong order or a typo). Searching takes much longer than makes sense in any sensible manner.

Of course, user's experiences don't matter when selling or supporting a software like this. I don't think it's part of the decision maker's conscious that usability (in the sense of being able to accomplish tasks efficiently) for a software that will be used by a larger part of the corporate workforce might be important not only for the employees using it, but also for the company. These systems can eat up so much work time of employees and create so many issues within a company and in customer or supplier relations...

One of the reasons companies adopt software like SAP is to replace process expertise with software. If a highly paid process expert accomplishes a task in half the time a poorly paid person accomplishes the same task with SAP, SAP wins if the poorly paid person makes half as much as the well paid one.

Also there is a question of scalability - the supply of smart people is limited and depending on smarts is risky. Hiring people that may even be smart when that's not required and that can't do any damage because the software prevents them from doing it will scale better than having to hire only smart people to operate more flexible software.

> One of the reasons companies adopt software like SAP is to replace process expertise with software. If a highly paid process expert accomplishes a task in half the time a poorly paid person accomplishes the same task with SAP, SAP wins if the poorly paid person makes half as much as the well paid one.

Assuming SAP is free both to license and implement. From what I've heard of SAP installations, that's rather far from the normal case.

It really depends on your scale. If you replace a thousand people who earn a thousand more than their replacements, you made a million right there.

> If you replace a thousand people who earn a thousand more than their replacements, you made a million right there.

Well, no, doing some quick research, because SAP annual license costs are substantially > $1000 per user, you've lost something like at least half a million and potentially several million in that case. Just considering license fees, and not other SAP-related costs.

What SAP and Oracle have in common is that they have a very capable sales force, that is able to convince companies that their business case will fit nicely into their model.

Then, once the implementation is ongoing and it turns out that there are some corner cases which were overlooked and that don't fit into the SAP model at all, SAP has another option available: hire their expensive consultants. Depending on how locked-in they are and how big their projects, this can completely destroy some companies.

Do you know of any case studies of companies being completely destroyed by this process? I have certainly heard of such projects getting into trouble, would be interested to know of any cases where it went as far as the customer going bankrupt.

I witnessed one myself when I was working as a consultant. It was a hospital that chose SAP to automate its invoicing system. When the implementation got stuck, the hospital was unable to send out any invoice for almost a year. In the end the money was finished and the government had to jump in and take over.

It is true that the management of the hospital made some big mistakes, but on the other hand it was SAP's sales team that had been very good at giving them opportunities to hang themselves.

Interesting, there must be a good reason for not going back to the old system or a manual system. A year is a long time without Billing and plan B

I've read that Target's botched expansion into Canada was largely attributable to SAP being awful. They haven't gone bankrupt, but years later their stock is still reeling.

There were all sorts of problems with Target's expansion into Canada, I'm not sure you could blame them specifically on SAP:

https://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-can...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956638

The data entered into SAP was riddled with errors, it sounds like a great example of "garbage-in, garbage-out".

My understanding was that the land Target used in Canada for their stores was leased to them by Walmart (who happened to own it for some reason, even though most of the lots used to be Zellers stores, and Eatons before that.) Walmart gave them extortionate prices and conditions on their lease.

They essentially choked their nascent competition in the Canadian market out of existence in the very same move that enabled the attempt.

Here are two examples where such claims were made:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2530405/it-careers/sap...

https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/boerse/news/id_47703844/sch...

From the first:> Shane Co. signed a contract with SAP AG in 2005 for a "highly sophisticated point-of-sale and inventory management system," with an original projected cost of $8 million to $10 million and a one-year rollout schedule, the filing states. But costs ended up skyrocketing to $36 million, and the implementation stretched out to 32 months before the ERP system eventually went live in September 2007.

Does anyone offer SAP rollout insurance?

If such a case exists, in my opinion, it would say more about the company than SAP.