They probably cheaped out on SAP consultants. Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants.
Is this facetious, or unintentionally so? Do you mean you need to replace one in-house staff with between 3 and 5 and presumably very expensive consultants?
Where do you think the customer is going to find that army of hyper competent experienced staff ideling around their premisess waiting for the day an SAP project drops?
Overloading the customer is one of the simplest ways to make sure ít is not your fault when things most often go south.
Also, because leading employees usually have no idea about the intricacies of the "old" system and think it's easily replaceable with a solution from the shelf.
One thing I've seen frequently is treating erp implementation as IT project. I'm a technical team member doing erp implementations for last 25 years (not sap) but I'll freely admit erp implementation is not about me or technology. It's primarily a business transformation project. You need those erp business process experts to guide and customize, AND you need thorough willingness to change your internal processes to fit the industry best practices you're buying. "successful erp project" empathically does not mean "installed it and it runs". It means thorough and detailed understanding of requirements, mapping to new processes, customization where absolutely positively necessary, substantial and organized and embraced business transformation, extensive training, and thorough testing including user acceptance testing.
If you think is erp as something you just install and life will be the same but magically better, you're gonna fail hard. Missed requirements and edge cases, and or significant internal resistance to change, are frequent challenges.
We've been fed an off-the-shelf solution with modern tech like Angular and the like.
And even without the SAP burden the company is basically destroying our departament. I guess they don't care to lose us poor peasants but they're basically losing al know-how and one of the only two edges they have against competition.
I can't say I care too much at this point, but it's amazing how easy can companies destroy themselves for not caring about their employees.
The most obvious failure modes are going for the lowest bidders incentivizing them to deliver with a skeleton crew, trying to nickel and dime the budget cutting features or their scope or straight up coming at the table with no documentation of how orgs own internal processes actually work.
I know of no project failing because of sap or their consultant on its own without any of the above comorbidities.
I find it very difficult to fight for sensible defaults in a company when everybody only sees their area and has a very strong opinion about that. Only a strong force like the SAP transition can break up with those encrusted structures.
After seven years and 500 million euro spent, the project was cancelled and they went back to using their old inventory system.
So, in this case, customising SAP to fit the company's processes wasn't worth it even for a rather large company like Lidl.
If memory serves well, Liqui Molly had similar, but cheaper, experiences with Microsoft.
Funny considering in the 80/90s SAP sales/management was known for saying that you don't adapt SAP to fit your company, you adapt the company to fit SAP. There was another company (was it Baan or JDE? I think Baan as I had too many meetings at the time with those religious fruitcakes) that said they were better than SAP because you don't need to change your processes; you change the software.
Baan still exists as Infor ERP Ln
That is a low bar. Your "lowest bidders" should at least be able to equal that. It just has to accomplish the business processes and do so within the software. It doesn't need to be fast, intuitive or look good doing it, it just needs to do it.