Re: Ex-SAP victim
Out of the frying pan?
Yes.
In 99% of instances IT "professionals" swallow the vendor's waffle, and procurement "professionals" then piss about doing trivia like D&B credit checks on their suppliers, but fuck up by really failing to even attempt to understand the business model and cost/pricing structures of their supplier. They never look at issues like turnover per employee, average margin, balance sheet goodwill costs and so forth. That's also why so much outsourcing goes wrong.
In the case of ERP, the stakes are raised, the buyer inputs are not. So buyers choose on some mythical belief of incredible (and improbable) business efficiency, fail to understand how, where and why the ERP vendor expects to get rich, and a few years later are utterly surprised to find themselves locked into a staggeringly expensive inflexible system that is difficult to change.
If your ERP and/or CRM are at the heart of your business, why are you outsourcing them to a rapacious high margin business who will leave you with a product so complex that you have to engage three different consultancies to make the most modest of changes? Most modern large businesses fail to see that they are IT businesses at heart, with whatever retail/energy/insurance/telecoms etc bias. If they understood that they were an IT business, they'd perhaps stand a better chance of not fucking up by handing their future to vermin like SAP, Oracle, Infor and the rest.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
