Yep, most of them are OK, some outstandingly so. You only ever hear of the disasters - successful projects don't make good press. So it SEEMS that all ERP systems are a scam, based on anecdotal evidence. Car analogy: Seriously has there EVER been a successful car journey that was anything other than a colossal fuckup? They crash all the time, get caught up in traffic jams, break down, you continuously fill it with fuel. And people continue to fall for this scam.

Yep, this sounds so familiar. I am an Oracle ERP consultant and have worked on dozens of sites over the years. Most of them are actually highly successful, some less so and only one has ever been a disaster and scrapped - in that case it wasn't software that was the problem, it was people, exactly like the Air Force debacle. When an implementation fails, it's easy to blame Oracle or SAP or "System X", but in my experience that's rarely the case, or rarely is it the root cause - there may be weaknesses in the software but all ERP systems are designed to be customised. So when an organisation commits to an ERP system, if it is to be successful then it has to work both ways: A. The ERP system has to be set up to work with the organisation (this may mean some customisations), B. At the same time the organisation may need to be modified to work with the ERP system. The problems come when B doesn't happen and the project uses A to compensate. If you don't want to do B then choose another ERP that fits your organisation closer. Or write something from scratch (good luck with that, the world needs another GL,AP,AR,SCP,MRP,FA etc)

All the houses are crap and Mike Holmes is going a round fixing them ONE AT A TIME!!!

Yes, this is exactly how it works. The only invoices that run smoothly through the system are the ones from SAP and the implementation partners.

Who these companies are and what the software does is not really the point of the story, its the fact that both of these HUGE companies have "lost" a very large software program that could have proved one or other or both of them are liable to pay one or the other or somebody else huge sums of money (or not). Saying that however, the word "SAP" in the story has triggered a lot of comments from people who use or make a living from installing and customising it. (Red rag, bull etc). Most of the feedback is negative because SAP is widely condemned as a POS (hope you can work that one out for yourself). And to be fair if the story had been about any other big ERP player like Oracle Financials you would have gotten the same reaction. The fact is that ERP addresses very difficult problems, every company works differently, every implementation requires planning, analysis, customisations, etc - there is no one model that fits all. Despite what you read here not all ERP implementations are failures, most of them are not, or SAP and Oracle would have been unprofitable and out of business years ago.

Waste Management (a big US company) sued SAP (largest accounting software company in the world) in March 2008 over a failed ERP (accounting software) project. Yawn.

Yes, spot the oxymoron.

This explains why Australians cannot write decent Java code, they can't find a virgin.

Hell is other peoples code.