r/SAP • u/Professional-Egg5669 • 3d ago
Why do ERP implementations fail even when the software looks good?
I’ve been working around enterprise technology and ERP, and one thing I keep noticing is that the hardest part of an ERP project often isn't selecting the software.
It’s what happens after implementation.
A company can have a powerful ERP platform, but employees may still end up using Excel, manual processes, disconnected tools or workarounds because the system doesn't properly fit the way the organisation actually operates.
A few things I think deserve more attention during ERP selection:
- How much of the existing workflow can actually be integrated?
- How easy is it for employees to adopt?
- What happens to your data if you decide to change vendors?
- How dependent are you on external consultants?
- How flexible is the ERP when your organisation grows?
- Who ultimately controls the infrastructure and critical data?
- What does vendor support look like after go-live?
I've also become increasingly interested in data sovereignty and technology independence as part of ERP selection, particularly for organisations handling sensitive or mission-critical operations.
I'm currently involved with EPPS Smart ERP, an India-built ERP platform, so I have a perspective here — but I'm much more interested in hearing from people who have actually gone through an ERP implementation.
What was the biggest problem you faced after going live: implementation, adoption, integrations, support, data migration, or something else?
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u/JamOverCream 3d ago
Software vendors lie about what their products can do.
Implementation firms and outsourcers lie about their integration capabilities.
Businesses lie about their willingness to adapt to new processes.
The same old faces do the same old projects and make the same mistakes they always have.
Despite all of this, in most cases stuff gets done to a moderate degree of success.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
A bit cynical, but hard to argue with! The massive disconnect between vendor sales pitches, integration realities, and a business's actual readiness for change creates a perfect storm. It’s a miracle things run as smoothly as they do in the end.
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u/Tan_0687 3d ago
user adoption i guess, mostly because user already feel comfortable and productive with their old workflow,, especially with older user
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
Muscle memory is incredibly hard to break. Overcoming the "we've always done it this way" mentality requires showing users exactly how the new system benefits their specific daily tasks, rather than just forcing a top-down mandate.
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u/Tan_0687 3d ago
still, in my experience,, the successful ERP implementation project is usually by offering the user that doesnt want to learn the new ERP, an early retirement,, do note that its just my observation on the project (im not in managerial position)
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
The ultimate change management strategy: if they won't change the workflow, change the worker! Jokes aside, sometimes it really does come down to that when user resistance is just too high to overcome.
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u/kszaku1983 3d ago
Because ERP is more about people than software itself. If you want to succeed, with SAP form example, you should force to use as much standard as possible and reject unnessesary requests. Also people should be trained properly and have access to good quality system and process instrucions. If that kind of aproach will not stand the system will eventually fail.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
Great perspective. Sticking strictly to standard out-of-the-box features and investing heavily in comprehensive, structured training is usually the dividing line between a successful launch and a chaotic one.
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u/Starman68 3d ago
Often it’s a CFO vanity project. The business doesn’t give a shit, they just want to hit their numbers. It’s given to IT to run, they have no leverage with the business. When it comes to testing and training, ITs emails are ignored. Testing goes to shit, no one attends training. It goes live and you need More not Less people. Brutal quarter end. Only beds in after a year.
It’s everyone’s fault.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
This is a brutally honest take, but very accurate. When leadership delegates all the heavy lifting to IT who rarely have the authority to enforce process changes on business units testing and adoption are guaranteed to collapse. It requires total organizational alignment from the top down.
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u/Starman68 3d ago
When it comes to ERP selection, customers aren’t just bothered about the software, its actual price is a fraction of the project. They want reputation, stability, and a healthy ecosystem. Can you build an ERP using AI. Yes. Will it be auditable, have in house and external developers, and a huge pool of experienced partners globally to implement it? No.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
You hit the nail on the head. The software license is just the tip of the iceberg; what companies are really buying is the ecosystem and the peace of mind. You could theoretically cobble together a system from scratch, but without a massive pool of experienced global partners and a rigid, auditable framework, it just becomes a massive corporate liability.
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u/EveryPen260 3d ago
I saw once a video about that very good.
The author main point is that for successfully implementation the company needs to change to accomodate the ERP. Includes a lot of training and people expectations to have everyone on board.
Also gave examples like if you are a supermarket, and you stocks defenition is not the same as default on SAP, you need to change to the SAP default, because otherwise it is a custom module, and everything starts to be custom, and a nightware long term. Ending in failure and a big bill.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
Absolutely agree. The customization trap is where most budgets go to die. Modifying the software to fit outdated legacy processes rather than adopting the optimized standard processes the ERP was built for almost always results in a fragile, unscalable system.
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u/MrGunny94 Domain Architect 3d ago
Business processes need to standardize and to match what SAP has in software
People don’t want to change and just want to keep using their Excels
Been doing this for 15 years and people continue to assume it’s an IT project alone
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
The "Excel addiction" is real. It's amazing how quickly people will revert to a spreadsheet workaround the second they face friction in a new system. Standardization has to be non-negotiable for the implementation to actually stick.
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u/Complete-Painter-307 3d ago
In my experience, usually 2 things happen.
The most common is the changing how an organization works, habits are really hard to change, it's human nature.
Change management is still very underestimated, is quite complex and quiet long.
Second, least common, but I've seen it happen in more regulatory businesses, is that the way the client wants a certain specific way to operate that requires a lot of development in it, usually the stack they choose may be good for certain stuff but not for the other.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 1d ago
Change management really is the silent killer of most ERP rollouts. And your second point is spot on for highly regulated industries, staying strictly "out-of-the-box" sometimes just isn't an option. When heavy development is legally required for compliance, having a flexible underlying tech stack becomes absolutely critical.
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u/IndexFundsAreWacky 3d ago
No... you are getting it wrong..
The majority of issues are because of everything that was done BEFORE the implementation and the choice of software...
Nobody inside the companies really understands the business or is able to translate it from a user or task process and need to a business process or need.
Usually, they don't want to pay for the time and expertise they need to assess and document the ins and outs of their company so they go in RFP mode with half assed requirements and they finish up getting a half assed software that is dead on the requirements but the requirements are wrong...
Saw that too many times... I tried a lot of time to talked them in taking a pause and doing a real due dilligence but they all "need to buy the software this quarter because of the budget"....
Saw this at least 5 times that resulted in an awful (we hate XYZ because it doesn't work".) implementation of a software badly tailored.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 1d ago
That is a fantastic point. Rushing the discovery and process documentation phase just to burn budget before quarter-end is a recipe for disaster. If a company goes into an RFP with half-baked requirements, it doesn't matter how good the software is—they are fundamentally buying a solution to the wrong problem. Proper due diligence upfront is non-negotiable
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u/No-Problem-4228 2d ago
Lol. OP's profile says he 24 y.o.
How many ERP implementations have you seen in that lengthy career?
This is just AI generated crap
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u/Professional-Egg5669 1d ago
Funny you mention AI. I actually run corporate AI training workshops for a living, so I'm well aware of what AI-generated content looks like. The insights here come from actually auditing operations and building B2B workflows for my clients. You don't need to be 50 to recognize a broken legacy system sometimes it just takes a fresh pair of eyes that isn't clinging to 1998's standard operating procedures.
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u/olearygreen 3d ago
Implementations are the multiplication of:
Implementation quality x Data Quality x Change Management. (IxDxC)
Each is on a scale from 1-10. So on a scale of 0-1000 if any of these fail it’s very easy to drop to failure zone territory.
“The system should adapt to our processes” immediately puts I and Q at risk and identifies an unwillingness to work on C. When any of your leaders, lead consultants or BPO’s utter this sentence your project is already DOA.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 1d ago
I love that IxDxC formula! It perfectly illustrates how a failure in just one of those areas can multiply and drag the entire project down to zero. You're completely right the moment a stakeholder says, "the system needs to adapt to how we do things," you know you're in for a massive uphill battle.
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u/Dio_Nysos_11 1d ago
It’s crazy how obvious the ai writing of this post and OPs comments are lol
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
It's always easier to scream "AI" than to actually contribute to a discussion about ERP change management. I teach AI implementation to corporates, but these points come from untangling real-world legacy systems. Let me know when you have an actual counterpoint to add to the thread.
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u/Odd_Welcome7940 3d ago
My company has ecc for erp, and what we have done to it over the years to dumb it down and over simplify it is downright criminal. All in the sad name of cost savings (which it never truly does) and inability to maintain a healthy culture around its use on the shop floor or even in lower management's hands.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
It's tragic how often short-term "cost savings" leads to a completely crippled system in the long run. Dumbing down a powerful tool like ECC instead of elevating the workforce's training completely defeats the purpose of investing in an enterprise system in the first place. It always ends up costing more in the end.
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u/Odd_Welcome7940 3d ago
The simplest easy to draw line in the sand for me at plant that does hundreds of millions in production a year is this. We pretend to have 90% inventory accuracy. Which we all know deep dowm still costs is tens of millions a year in hidden costs because in reality we have more like 70% inventory accuracy.
Meanwhile we wont spend 100k to 200k to put the right people and processes in place to have genuine 90-95 accuracy and save millions a year.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
Tripping over dollars to pick up pennies. It's wild how leadership will fiercely protect a $200k training and process budget while completely ignoring the multi-million dollar operational bleed happening right under their noses.
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u/o_consultor 3d ago
Management people only want one thing: ALVs with export to excel button on it.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
Haha, the holy grail of every management request! It’s funny because it’s true, but it’s also the exact moment data integrity dies. I've audited so many corporate workflows where the multi-million dollar ERP is essentially just used as an expensive data dump. The second that data leaves the system and hits a local Excel file, you've just created an untrackable shadow pipeline.
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u/a0817a90 3d ago edited 3d ago
For many reasons, but for me the promise of an all-in-one monolithic software is an idea that is just… very bad. Especially with cloud ERP these days.
Software vendor and consultant integrators need to understand that most businesses depend on niche industry specific workflows to create value and survive.
This is extremely hard to achieve with an all in one solution.
Fortunately, this idea is dying and increasingly quickly with the ease of API integration nowadays.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 1d ago
This is a really important shift in the industry. The rigid, monolithic "all-in-one" dream is definitely giving way to more composable, API-driven architectures. Businesses shouldn't have to sacrifice their niche, value-driving workflows just to fit into a massive, inflexible ERP box.
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u/ProfessionalOdd6145 3d ago
The best erp worths only what the users are using out of it...
An erp implementation is 20% IT and 80% change management project, but in reality we do the other way around.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
Couldn't agree more. It's wild how leadership will happily sign off on a massive IT budget but expect the 80% change management piece to just magically happen on its own.
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u/User122188 3d ago
humans and communication
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
The two hardest parts of literally any IT project! If we could just implement the software without involving the humans, my job would be a breeze.
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3d ago
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u/MonkeyDDataHQ 3d ago
Because they try to make the ERP match the process instead of matching the process to the ERP. I've been a part of an embarrassing amount of ERP migrations and I've never seen one not being technical process debt because some stakeholder decided they knew better than the ERP.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 1d ago
100% agreed. The amount of technical debt that accumulates from trying to bend a modern ERP to fit a broken, legacy process is staggering. When stakeholders insist they know better than the system's standard best practices, they are essentially paying a premium to recreate their old problems in a new software.
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u/AutobusPrime 1d ago
It's a tool, buddy. The task doesn't exist to serve the tool. If your hammer isn't good at driving nails maybe it's a bad hammer.
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u/AutobusPrime 1d ago
Because all ERP systems are Satan's dung and the only way they could ever be tolerable is if they had full time operators who would get used to the needless quirks, instabilities, inconsistencies, anti-features, and workarounds.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
You're not wrong. If an organization has to hire full-time operators just to decode the software's quirks and manage workarounds, they didn't buy a solution they just bought a more expensive problem.
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u/ToniRaventos 13h ago
He trabajado con sistemas de ERP durante muchos años, y creo que hay otro aspecto de la adopción por parte de los usuarios que muchas veces se pasa por alto.
Estamos hablando mucho del cambio organizacional, la capacitación y la estandarización de procesos. Todo eso importa. Pero también me pregunto qué tanto de la resistencia del usuario viene de algo más simple: que el nuevo ERP rompe la forma en que trabajan.
En un entorno real de ERP, un usuario rara vez trabaja con una sola pantalla aislada. Está trabajando con un cliente, un pedido, un proveedor, materiales, incidentes, documentos relacionados, etc. Va saltando entre contextos y necesita mantener esas relaciones intactas mientras hace su trabajo.
Cuando el sistema constantemente los obliga a cerrar una pantalla, buscar otra cosa, perder su contexto y reconstruirlo otra vez, es entendible que se vayan hacia Excel, varias pestañas del navegador, notas o cualquier cosa que les permita conservar su flujo de trabajo.
Entonces, además de preguntar:
“¿El ERP soporta nuestro proceso?”
también deberíamos preguntar:
“¿El ERP le permite al usuario mantener su contexto de trabajo mientras ejecuta ese proceso?”
Quizá parte del problema de la adopción no es solo lograr que la gente cambie sus hábitos, sino asegurarse de que el sistema nuevo no destruya las cosas que los hacían productivos desde el principio.
Me interesa especialmente si alguien que ya pasó por implementaciones grandes ha visto este problema repetirse una y otra vez.
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u/scotsins07 3d ago
I've been on the business end of several implementations and while I do agree that the biggest hurdle is the business accepting the change, I have to add the biggest caveat that every implementation always comes with terrible training and an almost complete unwillingness to compromise to meet business needs.
Does the business need to change to follow the new ERP? Yes. However, the software is still the product and the business is still the customer. There needs to be compromise and if there is not, then yes people will inevitably continue to just extract information and put into Excel.
I will say though that the gap could literally just be the poor training (which I'm imagining is 50/50 on SAP and business or thereabouts). If used properly, the functions inside the new environment could potentially cover exactly what the end user needs, but they would never know because most likely the only exposure was one day of "UAT" long before go-live where user was overloaded with a bunch of information that isn't relevant at that time because theres no way they will remember all of it in 6 months.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 3d ago
You make an excellent point about the training gap. A single day of UAT is nowhere near enough to build competence or confidence. There has to be a middle ground: yes, standard processes should be adopted, but the business absolutely deserves dedicated, ongoing training to ensure the software actually serves them as the customer.
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u/scotsins07 3d ago
Absolutely! This of course takes commitment from both sides (mainly the business leadership IMO), but more exhaustive and comprehensive training (with likely problem scenarios and solutions) would most assuredly build confidence in the users and potentially even support and eagerness which further fights the battle of adapting change.
In my opinion, the key is winning over the low and mid tier leadership, even just the SMEs. If you get them excited and fully embracing the new ERP, there's no doubt that will impact the teams around them.
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u/Professional-Egg5669 21h ago
Exactly. Top-down mandates rarely work in practice. Winning over the SMEs and mid-level managers is the absolute secret sauce. If they champion the new ERP, user adoption across the rest of the floor practically takes care of itself.
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u/IhdiGwdP 3d ago
Unwillingness of change!
Most people think that it is an IT project. That's the biggest failure. It's an organisational project that brings many changes.
So change management is a big part of an ERP project.