I worked on home grown internal apps a long while ago and saw the same happen. Upper management gets sold on some ERP system (SAP, Oracle doesn't matter) and believe it will save money, streamline things, etc. whatever the marketing/sales people of the ERP say it will do. The yearly expense for licenses on the ERP was enough to fund a team of 5-10 developers and QA.

Here are things upper management doesn't consider:

* Picking the same ERP solution everyone else in your industry uses means you have zero competitive advantage now. Homegrown solutions with teams staffed to run them could give you an advantage.

* You need to pay expensive consultants to do things with ERP. If you want any customizations they will be a bottleneck for all future updates, possibly having to bring in expensive consultants every time you need to upgrade.

* The culture shift for employees is usually negative across the board. The IT people supporting it, the end users inside the company, basically the choice implies that management doesn't value its people or their thoughts on how to do their work.

* Vendor lock in. Switching from one ERP to another isn't likely to happen. They can raise their licensing/cloud costs when contracts are up and your company is likely stuck.

Marketing is a helluva drug. People are trained to trust big companies and the bigger the company the more they trust it. I think the issue is the variance in solutions if you compare all the homegrown solutions against all the big company solutions. And that gets managers into the mindset that there's less risk in a generic big company solution. But of course that misses all the details for a specific case like yours.

It would be like interacting with other people who knew based on the average of everyone on Earth as opposed to dealing with the person you knew based on their own personality.

But it's easy to manage based on these kinds of broad generalities and, as the saying at least once went, no one gets fired for choosing IBM.

In this case, the third party company is tiny. And they keep screwing up. Even something as simple as right to left language translations they can't get right, even when we walked them through how it should work and shared code with them.

The reason is that their own people become exchangeable if you switch to something of the shelf.

Joke's on them, SAP is different everywhere.

Resume padding for managers and executives:

"Successfully lead SAP implementation bla bla bla saving bla bla bla streamlining bla bla bla"

> For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

The pointy-haired bosses of our nightmares are real.