Not quite.

I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration.

It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts.

There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work, the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture.

If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software.

Right. I’ve spent weeks creating automations in a business I knew very well, that would most likely save a few minutes per month for a low salary employee.

But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project.

The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people.

Needless to say, it was a disaster.

That’s a great point. Very often the cost of automating something in those large systems is larger than the cost of a minimum wage person spending a couple hours a day clicking stuff…