Didn't they know ?

When you sign with SAP, what you're actually doing is hiring a few SAP consultants for life. Once they're in, you can never get rid of them.
I don't think SAP has a single instance of a project that has been finished. They're all ongoing, under maintenance or whatnot.
As soon as you want to make a change, or add a "module" to what you have, you sign again for a few more SAPs to occupy your office space for months that invariably stretch to years.
SAP is really a very good company - for SAP that is.

SAP is crap

My employer spent $10M implementing SAP. Actually, the total bill was at least twice that, but they simply stop counting after a while.

It summary, it's utter crap. Whatever imperfections existed before SAP, the new system is worse in every conceivable way.

A better approach would be to hire three database geeks to hand-code you something. You might think SAP would be better than some hand-coded databases, but you'd be utterly wrong.

SAP is indeed crap

My company, the mail delivery corporation in Canada has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on SAP software. The interface was poorly designed by software developers at SAP and their QA is so great that to this day, years after the roll-out, we have bugs that have never been fixed. Productivity has tumbled to the point that there are now twice as many supervisors to enter the same information into the SAP as the system's predecessor.