>>You need to work the way your ERP works.

All I can say is that trying to force this is, by a large margin, the primary reason why major software projects fail. Software is meant to aid, not dictate, how people work.

You don't have to take my word for it. Just look at the industry. Companies like Salesforce have become enormously successful because their products are configurable and customizable to a crazy extent, and you can make them fit into virtually any business process.

In the case of SAP, the whole point of it is to dictate how your business should work for core undifferentiated processes. You’re buying the software BECAUSE it has business processes baked into it.

For core competencies where you do something differently from everyone else competitively, then SAP really has limited value except as a point of integration. Though I have seen some companies build entirely custom processes in ABAP for techno-religious reasons.

I view large software packages like ERP systems as different from a tool. You're adopting the metaphors of the system. Sometimes those metaphors are flexible enough to accommodate some of the nuance of the origination you're in, but sometimes you strain them too much or more likely misunderstand what the system is really doing.

People who advocate for letting the ERP dictate the rules are using the phrase as a shorthand for, "If you want to customize the hell out of it you probably shouldn't use it".

Agreed. If the ERP is not customizable to your company, then the employees will find ways to work outside of the ERP.

Then you end up with teams having their own Dropbox and a bunch of custom Excel templates. Worse yet, employees waste 20-30% of their time manually converting their custom process into the ERP.

Then if a key employee leaves, suddenly people wonder why the ERP isn’t correctly working anymore, without realizing that person was the glue, binding the actual custom process with the mandated ERP.

Configurable I like, customizable I don't.

My experience is that customisation gets turned off eventually, it always breaks something. Either that or it just doesn't get used. Companies are much more similar than they would like to admit. If an ERP is not going to work for you 95% out-of-the-box you should probably find something with a better fit.

Agreed - "Customizing ERP" is just a euphemism for "Breaking it in such a way that version upgrades will never go smoothly, ever."