http://www.pcworld.com/article/3010156/sap-dont-blame-us-for...
Actually I don't even know how SAP became so popular it's horrible
The latest Software Engineering Radio has an excellent discussion of the topic of large scale IT failure aka black swans: http://www.se-radio.net/2016/02/se-radio-epislode-250-jurgen...
Projects ran by vampiric consultants whom bill hourly -> "big deliverable never" -> ~ gigabuck$.
Smart tech buyers don't get locked into unbounded contracts without milestones and don't let drivers of project management to an external party. Instead, focus on customer need driven, fixed contracts and incremental milestones are generally a better approach.
SAP/Oracle/PeopleSoft/BMC/etc. implementations often tend to fall into these traps when they're poorly managed and/or when the buyers are suckers. Business unit owners and IT managers with backbones are needed to hold vendors accountable to deliver on promises, milestones and deadlines, or payment is not disbursed.
The other thing is that SAP does not (or at least did not) offer consulting services / configuring their software, they just sell the software, unlike most of their competitors. What it means is that all of the IT consultants will tend to push clients to choose SAP vs a competitor because it means more business for themselves. That's from my experience 10y ago, I don't know if it's still the case.
Pretty much any telephone billing system is late or shelved, for example.
In this case, you have a shipping conglomerate with divisions that can't talk to each other.