Hell runs SAP

We all have some painful things we need to do from time to time to make a living, like really bend backward and go against our very nature. For me, it’s when a customer calls CGI and asks to help them deploy SAP. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and calmly answer, of course send us the requirements we’ll have some people on site tomorrow morning.

For those of you outside the trade, deploying SAP in a business is like having a colonoscopy done on a boat during a storm at night by a drunken doctor with advanced Parkinson symptoms. You won’t be the same ever again. Not even close.

You first saw the ads in the train station like “Kellogg runs SAP” with a stock picture of smiling business man, so you figured out your business is as good as Kellogg therefore this is the path to go. Serious companies run serious software, don’t they? So you trade your personal judgement for a desire to behave like your peers do in hope that it will bring you success. Like that has worked before.

SAP being German software, you then begin to associate Mercedes qualities to the product. The word “rigorous” gets seeded into your subconscious. You want your business to ride like a C-class, don’t you? Next, you see the astronomical cost of the software, so you expect that SAP must really be a nifty piece of software made by Von Brown-class programmers. At this point your mind is loaded with very high expectations, you sign a fat check to the giggling SAP sales rep and you then cross you fingers everything will be okay.

It won’t. You just torpedoed your own business.

The first reason is that humans are not pessimistic enough, they can’t believe how screwed up a project can turn. Sure, you had a contingency plan but it’s likely to be paper thin compared to the cosmic issues that you will encounter. Humans have a hard time wrapping their minds on complexity on that scale, it’s like being able to understand perfectly the organisational structure of the entire U.S. administration from the Oval office down to the smallest division of all departments. It can’t be done.

The next reason why SAP projects go down in flame is that you must deconstruct your business to the molecular level and then rebuild it completely in a SAP fashion. Yes kids, the business must adapt itself to SAP, not the other way around. It’s German, you remember? So managing a company change of that scale will generate casualties on an epic scale. Orders won’t get processed because of IT snafus, confusion will arise even if you had planned the transition down to the smallest detail. If you’re into the manufacturing industry, changes on the line will take hours if not days to get processed instead of minutes. Customers will scream at you and go shop at a competitor who has not been infected by SAP yet. You might even loose market share in the next quarter and get hammered by Wall Street. Are you having fun yet?

And then there’s the SAP software itself. If you thought IT was complex, wait until you see the SAP semi arrive at your location, loaded with boxes and boxes full of DVDs and documentation. Learning to speak Japanese, German and Klingon must be kids play compared to installing and maintaining SAP. This piece of crap is so fucking complex that nobody on Earth can claim to fully master all the components of this software. For one thing, SAP experts tend to die young, divorced and bald. When my SAP experts ask to take a day off to chill, they go manage the JFK runways on a Friday night. Man, that was easy they say to me the next Monday.

So if tomorrow the devil makes you purchase SAP and you want us to help, call me personally. If you don’t mind, I’ll first send you my therapist to understand the subconscious desires to deploy SAP. It may take a few months, billable time of course.