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0 pointsmisja1117y ago0 comments

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.

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rwallace7y ago

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.

misja111OP7y ago

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.

zaphirplane7y ago

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

iron00137y ago

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.

teh_klev7y ago

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".

derefr7y ago

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.

lixtra7y ago

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...

tzs7y ago

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?

laythea7y ago

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

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