Well, management did. Every other phrase they uttered was "The old system did it this way" or "I used to just press F2". The pushback to learning something new was unreal.
Nevermind the fact that multi-step processes were reduced to a simple button click. Or that inventory and customer management were orders of magnitude better. The old system!! The old system did it another way!
The same with the parent commenter's thoughts, "Sure, developers can screw up [business transformation projects], but they cannot make them succeed."
More generally, a good way to botch a business transformation project is to select technical solutions without a keen grasp of how they fit your business need, and to bullheadedly stick with those solutions as friction is revealed with the business needs.
Both distorting the business around vendor software and ending up continuously fighting with the vendor software throughout th effort (both of which are commonly cited “how to fail” routes) are clear (though superficially opposite) symptoms of that same failure occurring upstream in the process.
- From the ERP end: you want it to be as flexible as possible so that it can reflect how the business actually operates and should operate in the future
- From the organization's end: you want to identify not only how the business currently operates, but how you would want it to operate in an ideal world
Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because it's what they really need, or are they buying it because everyone else uses it?
2. HR, Finance, all the backoffice stuff - that's not your competitive advantage. It's not your core business. You just want to do it as efficiently and quietly as possible.
3. Therefore, in ideal case, a company realizes it is not a special snowflake, buys an ERP, implements it as vanilla as possible, and quietly goes on focusing on what IS their competitive advantage / core business... rather than spending years, millions of dollars, and tremendous risk, by trying to customize ERP to some obscure different process they just "must" have :-/
however, not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. It's a massive undertaking and takes total commitment from so many different people and roles in an enterprise. You need genius PMs and BAs along with a genius client team before you even talk about the actual technical people.
Sometimes it depends who you ask; I found that hands-on people on the ground and SMEs tend to be very negative about it, for personally valid reasons - it's a lot of work, it doesn't go smoothly, and it disrupts and changes what and how they do it.
However, there are quite a few ERP implementations where the top-level stakeholders feel the results are worthwhile the disruption and pain, and from that perspective it "went well" - the business objectives were overall met, whether it be capabilities or speed or reporting or integration/centralization or headcount or complexity reduction, all of it ultimately boiling to money at some level...
Only the top-level stakeholders felt the results were worthwhile the disruption and pain -- that they did not suffer.
But have you ever heard of one going well ?
As in, not just worthwhile to a tiny minority of the people on the top?
Yeah I bet it makes stuff more efficient, but clearly there's a disparity between the people suffering "disruptions and pain" and the ones who ultimately feel it has been worthwhile.
And maybe, just maybe, what is right for the business is bad for the majority of the staff. At least in the short term. I know that is a bitter pill to swallow, but it is reality.
Perhaps an example more palatable on HN would be Uber replacing all its drivers with software. Clearly better for the business.
If you're selling widgets, and selling 100 units a month, there are growing pains on the path to 100 units a day and 100 units a minute that you can't anticipate, and that billion-dollar retailers have already figured out. So I think to the extent that physical B2C sales is pretty constant across industries, you know that if you're big enough to justify the investment in SAP or a similar ERP platform, there exists a process that you'll need 0.5, 1, or 5 years from now that they have and you can't really articulate today.
"Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work."
Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.