> SAP projects always seem to require battalion strength coding teams
> to get the thing working at all, let alone meeting the inflated
> claims of the vendor.
They're not alone: a local university where I worked decided to go PeopleSoft ...
> At a large chemical and materials science firm I consulted for
> several years ago, a project to create an SAP 'portal' to all the
> company's information was started by the Chief Information Officer
> (the payoff was supposed to be unheard of collaboration and
> "business intelligence" opportunities...whatever).
The university's IT department's pitch was the above, plus Y2K. But it turned out
* it was easy/cheap to fix date handling in the old mainframe-based
code (and tables--the DBAs had the real fun :-)
* it was hard/slow/expensive to get their PS replacements working
* they maintained (and may still) _two_ sets of systems
* (rumor had it) whenever they got somebody trained to the point where
s/he could contribute productively to the integration effort, PS
would try to hire them away as consultants :-)