I remember that the internal propaganda at Oracle was always going on about how SAP forced a business to changes its processes to match the software rather than the other way around.

Obviously this was to draw attention to how much easier it was to plug Oracle apps into a business's existing practices, although I don't know if Oracle's apps are/were actually any better than SAP's in that direction since I never had anything to do with the apps group at all.

Doesn't sound like SAP are really doing any better than they used to, though.

Shut Up And Pay

Mines the one with the large hole torn in the back.

SAP - one of the most hated companies in the industry. But their marketing people give outstanding blow jobs, cause not even OUR executives aren't THAT stupid.

Andersen - change your name and avoid prosecution. Who'd a thunk it would work?!

Oracle - Rounding out the AXIS OF EVIL!!! But at least the database engine pretty much works.

If all 3 of these companies evaporated tomorrow the earth would be a measurably better place.

Why do executives keep drinking these people's Kool-aid? Oh yeah, the good blow jobs. Well at least we know...

Paris? No, she has far too much integrity!!! Hmm.... YEAH! BILL! (Can there be 4 members in the Axis?)

When we tried SAP Business one, they integrator was desperate for us to stop using the old system which we refused to do and ran them all in parallel. Two years latter when they just couldn't get anything to work, words were mentioned about our lack of payment and a law suit was mentioned. The result was a fraud counter suit was mentioned and they took their buggy software and went home.

SAP is still showing a video of how they helped us improve our productivity by using their software and we occasionally get contacted by people saying they bought SBO because of the video. So far they have all received full refunds.

..absolute pants.

Err, mine's the denim one

One place I worked we implemented Oracle Financials and Siebel for ERP and CRM, due to some standard modification for my country, like foreign characters (not in 7bit ascii) and some unique taxes and legislations, we were unable to book incoming orders and do proper book-keeping for a long time. It took 30 highly trained (=expensive) consultants 3 months just to fix those small changes into a barely workable system.

The company never recovered, but I believed it to be because of terrible management and wrong products more than the ERP implementation.

SAP is full of failed SysAdmins and (l)users on a power trip. The problem with selling SAP as a package "for users" is that the Users tend to think they can understand this technology and make informed decisions on their own.

Because I use to develop in ABAP I get endless job offers for SAP Administration roles. I would rather feed my manhod through a mincing machine than do SAP Basis.

Our massive multinational is currently rolling out SAP across the entire business, replacing so-call "legacy" (but perfectly working and stable) systems all over the world.

We've been saying for ages its going to end in tears and cost far more than it could ever hope to save, but no-one listens, the project managers all have serious boners for SAP, even though few have a clue what the hell it even is.

Mines the one with the Microsoft logo.

Anderson "managed" an SAP project at Mobil in South Africa last century. One might have thought the Androids would have learned from that, but apparently not.

It went many times over-budget and at the end of it, what was merely a regional oil company found that they had the largest petroleum invocation of SAP in the world - higher complexity, more modules, greater transactions-per-second (and more expensive) than any other single SAP installation at the time. They had to buy a bigger mainframe at huge cost merely to be able to run the beast.

Even then, it was so unstable that technicians had to stay logged on to the system from Waldorf to prop it up internally. And initially the database kept collapsing because of the unexpectedly high levels of concurrency.

Not pretty.

Mobil solved the problem by selling off the affiliate (who eventually wobbled on to project completion) and making sure that all subsequent SAP projects were smaller and tightly scoped.

SAP Best blow jobs in the industry that's why formula one drivers have the logo on their helmet.

When I was at QVC, the BA in charge of the SAP roll-out kept a newspaper cutting of MFI suing the pants off SAP and their consultants as a reminder of the payback he was going to get when QVC sued.

What?... they should have opted for the SAP Engineered version... and not the plain vanilla one... tsc tsc...

Mine is the denim one... engineered though...

What, you mean that big SAP implementation we've had running for 3+ years is going to mysteriously sprout gremlins and kill the bizz? And there was me thinking the careful and deliberate design, the long testing and acceptance phase, and internal training, had immunised us against the dreaded Curse Of SAP! Oh, hold on a sec - it did!

First two rules of enterprise projects - the cheaper solution may actually work out more expensive in the long run; and pay peanuts, get monkeys! As I always put it to my project managers, the actual acquisition price of any solution is only about 20% of the complete solution's cost over the lifecycle if you get it right! Get it wrong and you consign yourself to a very expensive lifecycle even if you end it early. Take your time and spend your money on the planning stage before the purchase (honest, it doesn't all end up on widescreen HDTVs in BOFH Central) and you will save money after the buy.

OK, so I order kit on a SAP system. In order to keep track of what is on SAP I use a Excel/Access system to record what I'm doing. The SAP system is the pits for any sort of work if you don't keep your own records. So, instead of one set of records you add to the system the company has mandated your own system for keeping track. I can give my boss stats too. Anonymous for obvious reasons.