There’s nothing new here. It happens from time to time. But surprisingly more often than you might think. A company signs up for the “Big” system and kills itself trying to implement.
And this… Shane Co’s Reference for SAP
Turns into this… Shane Co’s bankruptcy
Basically they spent more than 10% of a years revenue on SAP!
They spent more than a million dollars per store!
I’m very surprised that they didn’t shut it off a lot sooner. I’m more surprised that SAP hasn’t taken the reference off the website.
I have seen this happen before. Quite often systems like this are really more like toolkits, rather than configurable off the shelf systems. And there is a lot of heavy lifting to do to get them going. It gets complicated, and complexity kills implementations.
It can happen as well with hosted systems but with something like NetSuite there is a level of complexity that is removed by going hosted. And you can turn on the system in phases to get quick wins early. But most of all, it’s just way cheaper and isn’t going to kill your company in the process.
My 2 cents for the day.