Top 10 SAP Implementation Failures of All Time

[@ronbrotherton1006]

Thanks, Eric. I did know about Hershey, Waste Management but not all of the others. Was truly surprised by National Grid. I spent about 12 years in the public utility business - on the generation side, then engineering and consultancy. Paramount focus for all parties is public safety so I was shocked to see that proper planning around business continuity was not attended to here. Perhaps an extended cutover period where transactions occur in the legacy systems but captured, propagated to test systems for stressing and error detection. I realize this does carry a cost but core functions are guaranteed to proceed as usual. Hiccups in test have the time to be sorted and risk is reduced significantly. As an SAP veteran, I've seen some other very unstable projects delivered by partners - one specifically mentioned in your assessment here. One case where the system ground to a halt 5 minutes, yes, 5 minutes after an 8 am go live on a Monday before Thanksgiving. All inbound/outbound processes stopped. Ouch. Very prominent individual owned the company but will go unnamed here. The integrator really messed up - no SAP services involvement.

[@robolsen8417]

Thank you for the video. It helped me so much in my ecommerce class. I can understand what your saying, the way you say it. Thanks!

[@erickimberling]

I’m glad it helped!

[@maikbanner7552]

Not just SAP, in case of all IT Projects, most CIOs when they select Vendors, do not want to do a detailed process discovery, to determine suitability of the prospective products to their Processes, i mean Process discovery upto Task & Work Instruction level. Another part is most SAP Consultants are obsessed with SAP Best Practices, so Blueprint phase is just a lip service. So the amount Change Requests in Realization Phase swells. The attitude of Program Management Team of the Implementation Partner is inward focused of meeting the project schedule.

[@stephenmacaleer7214]

Everything mentioned could be typical and applied to any IT implementation, nothing specific to SAP.

[@sheetaleinstein]

quite informative. SAP implementations are a lot dependent on the dedication of business users.

[@mffakhru5567]

superb.

[@erickimberling]

Thank you! Cheers!

[@johncatsicas101]

Thanks Eric - the biggest reason for failure is trying to coordiante the disparity of the operational workflows and procedures at Business Unit to one overall process that any ERP demands. The best way is start with the easiest modules- accounting and the move outwards to operational systems (taking the least complex to most complex). Fast tracking an ERP system is too risky. Thanks again for your insights. As they say, nothing beats experience. Go well