LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

This is so unacceptable yet happens so often. Here in the Netherlands the government has several projects that failed with costs amounting to hundreds of millions. For sums as these any Organisation can just setup a more capable development company that could handle all of the internal projects and its developers could be top of the line.

> Software from the Walldorf-based software company SAP was to be adapted to the needs of Lidl. So far, however, the new system has only been introduced in the small agencies in Austria, Northern Ireland and the USA. It has been shown that the SAP version developed by over one hundred IT specialists is not suitable for high-turnover countries.

I realize these words are not directly from the company and I am reading them through Google translate, but I do think they accurately reflect what makes these implementations work or not. If you are getting into SAP and "adapting it to your needs" then you will almost certainly fail.

Scenario: I am implementing SAP's invoice approval workflow in a company that already has an invoice approval workflow that a former CFO designed quickly after a problem a few years earlier. Its worked fine.

Companies who are successful implementing SAP: "I mean SAP's workflow makes sense, is already implemented, works for much larger companies, and has no bearing on our core business, so lets just switch to that.

Companies who fail at implementing SAP: "Lets hire some consultants to adapt SAP to our needs"

Source: I did process flows in preparation for SAP implementations in the late 2000s.

This specific case, though, is totally acceptable : Lidl is a company in a market with great opportunities for competition. If this decision was a waste of money, a smaller , SAPless company can come and eat their lunch.

The Dutch government is a very different story. Until we have a few parallel governments between which we can easily choose , without having to uproot our entire lives, it is a pathetic waste of tax payer money. I dream sweet dreams of accountability and proper incentive structures for government and public servants.

One day.

Looks like they canceled it in the testing phase and noticed it simply didn't work or under performed. With those very expensive consultant hires (SAP is notoriously expensive, both licensing and consulting) it might have been cheaper to cancel it outright then to dragging it along. I applaud their idea to do it in house as they are big enough to have IT/Supply line software as a core principle which can save you money in the end, and not as an external expense which is just an annoyance.

I don't know much about SAP besides the fact that I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about it (but then again, nobody talks about the trains that are on time). I always assumed that it was a "nobody gets fired for choosing SAP" situation. It's huge, it might be clunky but you know that if you pay for the support it'll probably end up doing mostly what you want and it'll mostly keep working. The alternatives would be either using a less popular solution or creating one in-house but in both cases you're taking additional risks even if it might pay off in the end if everything goes right.

It's the same situation with Oracle, Microsoft Windows and countless other "corporate" software solutions. If you look at it from a hacker point of view it makes no sense, it's ridiculously expensive, it's often overkill, it's not elegant, you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc... Now if you look at it from the point of view of a company that needs something that will work 100% by a given deadline and you want somebody you can yell at if it doesn't (and you want to know they'll still be here 6 months from now) it makes total sense.