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LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

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Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#201

Post by manquer »

kirbypineapple wrote: post #31
antpls wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My model is basic, but at $1200/day per consultant, with 100 consultants, that's still about 4160 days, or about 11 years. Not what I would consider fast.

$150 per hour is on the low end for good SAP consultants. We were paying $300 per hour for some InfoSys SAP HANA people, and even independents were around $200+. If they're doing anything beyond vanilla consulting work with SAP then I doubt they're using cheaper offshore talent. Or maybe they are and that's why this project has failed so spectacularly. (Note: I'm not saying all offshore talent is hot garbage, I'm say…

True, but not all 100 of them are that level or being used full time for years would they ?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#202

Post by cerberusss »

freehunter wrote: post #135
dragonwriter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SAP failed implementations are unique from other software failed implementations. No, they aren't. > It doesn't fail because of the product; it fails because of the people and politics of the organization. Essentially all project failure are for that reason. (Including ones where one intermediary step on the route to failure was that the people and politics in the organization ended up selecting a solution that was…

The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture. The company's engineers were young and viewed themselves as a startup, which means they like to use bleeding-edge solutions. The company themselves were an old enterprise with well-worn problems, and picked exactly the technology they should have. Unfortunately a newer,…

> It was $110m down the drain on the first product

What happened afterwards? Did this trigger management to consider why the purchase was the wrong one? I.e. was it a $110m lesson? Or was it really wasted money?

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#203

Post by manmal »

rbanffy wrote: post #164
manmal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so no organizational benefits?

Perhaps you need fewer people maintaining those business apps.

Well, adapting one‘s processes to a standard solution is a major change in your business, so I‘d expect some kind of effect..

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#204

Post by zaphirplane »

misja111 wrote: post #118
rwallace wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any case studies of companies being completely destroyed by this process? I have certainly heard of such projects getting into trouble, would be interested to know of any cases where it went as far as the customer going bankrupt.

I witnessed one myself when I was working as a consultant. It was a hospital that chose SAP to automate its invoicing system. When the implementation got stuck, the hospital was unable to send out any invoice for almost a year. In the end the money was finished and the government had to jump in and take over. It is true that the management of the hospital made some big mistakes, but on the other hand it was SAP's sal…

Interesting, there must be a good reason for not going back to the old system or a manual system. A year is a long time without Billing and plan B

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#205

Post by tonyedgecombe »

solarkraft wrote: post #141
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #24

Years ago I did some contract work for a company that was being taken over by a competitor. The consensus in the business was that implementing SAP had weakened the business so much they had become an easy target for takeover.

Do you know details about the implementation? Did they try to customize everything?

I was only involved on the periphery so I'm not sure. I do know they had an army of consultants working there so I imagine so.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#206

Post by mercatort »

I have worked in three organizations that used SAP. All three had problems and the high sunk costs made it hard to move elsewhere. I think a good way to measure theefficiency of the systems is to call three random admins or secretaries at an institution. In my experience, everyone complained about version incompatibilities, speed, logic (I got to see the UX once, it was a nightmare).

I would estimate using the SAP systems costs about 10% of productivity (net after gains through digitalization of processes).

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#207

Post by dragonwriter »

derefr wrote: post #189
dragonwriter wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture. The company culture is a central piece of any business problem you are addressing, if your solution doesn't address it, it isn't addressing the actual problem, but at best a lower-dimensional projection.

Usually there’s no interface to addressing such problems. Interacting with the cultures of some companies is like trying to treat the mental illness of someone in a dissociative fugue state. You might have a solution that fits how things are on the inside—but how are you going to even get through to them to communicate that, when they can’t hear or see you and are instead lost in their own little world?

> Usually there’s no interface to addressing such problem

I think you mean correcting culture to some preferred ideal, and that's likely true.

But what I'm saying is that institutional culture is a factor of every problem facing the institution, whether is a thing to fix as part of the solution or a constraint on viable solutions.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#208

Post by petepete »

rbanffy wrote: post #164
manmal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so no organizational benefits?

Perhaps you need fewer people maintaining those business apps.

Plus hiring and getting new employees up to speed is much much faster. This is especially useful with SAP consultants who are quite expensive. The initial cost may be high but once it's done it's savings at every step.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#209

Post by erikb »

netinmate wrote: post #86

Customization is key, you CAN't customize. I worked on an SAP implementation, a Fortune 500 company, complexity like crazy, sub-companies, of sub-companies, of sub-companies, federal, state and local compliance for what the company did, operating in 50 states, with an International supply chain, and our integrator was nothing special. We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SA…

This pretty much applies to _all_ software development as well, especially in a standard environment like ERP. There is not much need for new stuff, just learn the ropes for what already worked the last ten years, then handle the complexity of enterprise life with simply applying them. Creativity is only useful if you can handle >90% of the cases with ease already.

And for a customer of enterprise software I would so much agree. In my experience the people who manage the integration with third party software usually have no clue what the software is about. Instead of being arrogant it would be much smarter to learn from the software vendor, who's an expert in his field and has seen dozens of customer environments, how to solve certain problems.

Re: LIDL cancels SAP introduction after spending 500M Euro

#210

Post by acdha »

netinmate wrote: post #86

Customization is key, you CAN't customize. I worked on an SAP implementation, a Fortune 500 company, complexity like crazy, sub-companies, of sub-companies, of sub-companies, federal, state and local compliance for what the company did, operating in 50 states, with an International supply chain, and our integrator was nothing special. We held firm to the NO CUSTOMIZATION rule, we re-engineered our processes to fit SA…

The psychology is fascinating. I worked at a place with a heavily customized fork of a vendor system which was almost old enough to drink. They had a stable of developers in an increasingly uncommon language, upgrades were year+ exercises with hefty consulting bills, etc. but most of the management were convinced that this was the easiest option because everyone was used to it.
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