[quote=no_such_reality]ERP typically hits Finance and the core business Operations.
Those same groups, typically try to penny pinch on other IT projects and typically then get mediocre results. So when it comes to their primary work flow tool, they feel like they need to buy quality.
The projects often go completely off the rails and projects then get sponsored to fix the problem with the app affecting the core business, they’ll pay even more for that.
Honestly, I’ve seen companies just lose their minds with major ERP implementations, literally, little companies, sub-billion, sub-$500 million spending $20-$30 million on ERP armies of off-shore consultants 70-80 developers customize code to work. Insanity. And of course, it works like a cobbled together mess because the businesss refuses to think that they don’t have a ‘best practice’ that they are insisting on being customised.
But in the end, the companies go with the ‘safe’ big house consulting solution, pay through the nose for it and the houses know it, so that decision makers minimize being the scapegoat for what ultimately will be a failed massive expenditure, because many business stakeholders approach it with the same realism that approach things like dieting.
/cyncism.
And a jaded IT guy would ask if $200K is enough to watch a slow motion train wreck unfurl over a year knowing the whole time, you’ll be the primary target of blame and will have to defend it and fight to then continue getting your company paid?[/quote]
Funny part is that about 10 years ago, I was at a then startup company that IPOed that was providing EAI/B2B integration to such ERP systems. We built datasource adapters to SAP using ABAP and SAP IDocs to our integration server that allowed people to use a GUI to map data from SAP ABAP calls and IDocs to other data types (for example, a relational database, or another backoffice system). We also included a workflow and data transformation engine. Company made good money doing this. The pitch was you didn’t need a specialized SAP consultant to do this…Well sort of… You needed a consultant familiar with our EAI platform that was costing about the same as the ERP consultants did…LOL…So I think most companies ended up ditching these middlemen products, especially after the big companies (SAP, Oracle,etc) started to provide much cleaner interfaces to expose their data.
Those SAP $200k consulting jobs aren’t going away anytime soon. Just like you still have people hiring to do COBOL.
