>>SaaS can be on-premises.
True; the distinction between SaaS and COTS becomes moot in practical terms then, and all of my comment still applies.
>>The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need to adapt to the tool.
Again, that's:
- True for an IT project whose goal is to support whatever the user is currently doing (and what many of us are trained to do / think in current IT paradigm).
- Not True for a business transformation project whose goal is to change business processes for the better - and, basically incidentally, deliver a COTS ERP to support them through an IT portion of the project.
We are not talking about where the button is or how many times it takes to click or what the icon looks like. We are talking fundamental business processes and workflow, which are core to how a business operates internally.
For business processes which are company's core business, presumably they have them figured out. That's great, and IT should support them.
For back-office ERP, this is not your company's core business; you're probably not a special snowflake; and the market's average/best practices are likely miles ahead of your legacy over-complicated business processes. YOU need to change if you want to reap the benefits of shiny expensive new software.
There is extremely limited point in implementing a new back-office ERP (HR, Financials, CRM, EPM, etc) if you're not willing to approach it as BT project; radically change how you do things; and expect a shiny new tool to make you more competitive automagically without your processes and maybe even culture/habits changing.
My fundamental point remains: what the big consulting companies do with ERP / backoffice implementation (when done right) are primarily BT projects, and incidentally involve IT implementations; and treating them as IT projects, whether that's Sally in accounting refusing to change or Bob the developer accommodating Sally thinking it's the right thing to do, will cause them to fail.
(generalizations and oversimplifications abound in above statement; but it really takes a very very large and repeated application of a mental sledgehammer to dislodge some universally-good but specifically-counterproductive ideas and habits from the ERP space)