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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

In the late 90s, early 2000, the Danish department of defence decided that they needed a new procurement system, DeMars, built on SAP. I know a sergent that worked in procurement at the time, he made insanely large purchases of everything he was responsible for in the months leading up to the launch. It came to the point where he was pulled in for questioning, on the suspicion of fraud. He explained that he had no faith in the launch of DeMars and wanted to ensure that stock would not run out. Everything was accounted for, if anyone believe that he as committing fraud, they where welcome to do a complete inventory.

DeMars launched, and procurement basically stopped for a year. Only the items my friend was in charge of remained in stock, through out the launch/roll-out process.

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There's lots of pushes to add software to more of the military, but I don't think these kinds of resilience questions are really taken seriously. A system intended for wartime use will be running in non-optimal conditions while under constant attack. But many of these "enterprise" systems barely work better than paper to start with.

I think that's changed a bit - witness how reluctant the US gov is to be locked into Anduril Lattice. I think we'll see this start to change but certainly a lot of bad past decisions to make up for.

When HP converted to SAP, I think their production basically stopped, for six months, and they lost $400 million.

Switching to a new system; even when it is for the better, is a painful, expensive process.

The company that I worked for, did a successful transition to SAP, but it took about two years, and a lot of butthurt.

Switching to SAP ERP was already an in-joke level of well-known catastrophe in IT consulting circles 20 years ago. I’m glad to see nothing has changed in that respect.

Sap adds so much syrup to the gears of business that it kills some.

I feel like a ton of SAP transitions only succeed because they have to.

They say its easier to change your company to fit SAP than to mold SAP to fit your company.

(Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on the ERP stuff or anything of that sort.)

From what I've been told, this is actually supposed to be a selling point of SAP: They have built tools to fit the processes of the industry leaders, so by buying into SAP, you're buying into the winning way of doing business.

I am not endorsing this opinion or making a claim regarding its veracity, just stating that that is what I have heard.

I remember reading an article about a hospital switching computerized medical record system and the CIO had a killer quote along the lines of "every extra day I take on this migration, people die"

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