Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

In my experience, with these types of project, 20% of the error is on useless partners, 80% on useless clients, who have no knowledge of how their current system works, are not willing to compromise on any existing features (because it's always easier to say "no" than to try and convince others to say "yes"), and don't really care about the migration one way or the other, because they weren't really asked in the first place

If Apple had been in the B2B enterprise space, the iphone would be an exact clone of the blackberry

It really does. They are all custom tailored for each client. The customization includes data sources, processes, reports, and a range of other topics. It's difficult because the project is to replace a working system with another different working system with minimal downtime. Often, a large number of people need to be retrained on the replacement system -- a system that integrates with a labor force of 50,000 people is not uncommon.

> Does ERP really need customisation?

Yes, for a number of reasons:

1. An ERP system consists of thousands of modules, out of which a smaller subset is needed by the customer. One typically pays by module so you want your number of modules to be as small as possible.

2. A customer this size has already implemented a number of business processes that they are not willing to sacrifice, even though an ERP provider will do their best to have them import "their" way of doing things.

3. Customers want to acquire an edge, not be on the same level playing field as the competition. "Kill you darlings" - eh, no.

4. If a municipality buys an ERP system tailored to manufacturing/trading, well then you have substantial customization ahead.

Former ERP consultant here. There are infinite ways to do business: different perspectives to take on the same situation, different deal structures, different data sources, reporting, etc.

You can run your business / org exactly as the ERP designers envisioned, but that means you'll have to adapt to your ERP, which is wrong-headed and certainly much more expensive in a large org.

Even the most vanilla implementation for a small business will have a degree of customization.

Yeah, I don't think it would be any cheaper, or any likely to meet success. Succesful software development is hard, whether you hire a consultancy or are a non-software company trying to create an in-house department.

Software around workflow (an ERP) is one of the most challenging areas. Because it is hard to shoe-horn it into a universal pattern, or figure out what a given organization actually needs (not always what they say they need).

To do it in-house succesfully requires a level of healthy functioning in the organization as a whole (to be able to figure out and decide functional requirements, to prioritize, to give engineering the environment where they can be succesful, etc) that few organizations have.

And with current software engineer salaries (and UX designer, product manager, etc), even if all your cards are in order for success (very rare), few could afford it. It am confident it would not be cheaper than the big ERPs; you'd hope it would at least reliably end up better/less bad than the big ERPs for the cost, but I'm not confident of that either.