Why do companies buy SAP R3
I just got my weekly issue of (fill in your weekly computer rag) and under the news section is “Difficult ERP Rollout Slows Furniture Maker”. Is it just me or does this seem like the norm with SAP R/3 rollouts?
Let's see there was
The City of San Antonio
Rowe Furniture
Dell Computer
That whole UK fiasco with EDS ( I pretty sure that was SAP R/3 )
So my question is who is buying this crap and why do companies continue to try and roll it out when there is one high profile, expensive, failure after another?
Dell Computer tried to use SAP to replace its DOMs (Dell Order Management System). This was many years ago and the price tag that I recall was around 14 million dollars. For what? Not a single Dell employee was using SAP when I worked there. In fact Dell tried to replace DOMs so many times it became something of a joke [but that's another post]. It is always amusing to watch a company squirm because their entire backend system is running on a competitors hardware (Tandem).
Has anyone worked on a SAP R/3 rollout that wasn't a death march? I really want to know. Five or six years ago I was seriously considering jumping to the SAP platform because the developers were making gobs of money. These days you couldn't pay me to work on a SAP rollout. I'm both older and smarter. Who wants to work on something doomed to fail?