SAP supplies rubbish software
Bin there, done that
IF THERE IS one thing that a waste management company understands, it’s rubbish. And that is precisely why Waste Management Inc is suing SAP for selling them software that was, literally, only fit for the bin.
Texas-based Waste Management told Reuters that it had spent about $100 million on a computer system that was supposed to help them save money, but found,to their dismay, that it instead turned out to be a complete failure.
Waste Management, which is, apparently, the premier US rubbish transporter, ordered the task management software from German based SAP. The programs were supposed to facilitate billing, waste logistics, container management and on board computing. It was also supposedly designed especially for clients in the US, but according to the lawsuit 'the United States version of the Waste and Recycling Software was undeveloped, untested and defective'. In other words, it was a hunk of junk.
The company is now seeking punitive damages plus expenses from SAP, who Reuters said had no comment on the matter. µ
L’Inq
Reuters
Comments
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.SAP
And spare a thought for the poor translators who have to render SAP documentation into something intelligible. SAP-lish, SAP-Deutsch, SAP-francais etc are as good as unintelligible. A company that creates its own dialect is always a sign of a one that's insecure of its linguistic abilities, if not its message, in my experience. It's like the reams of gibberish marketing/PR companies have churned out by employees too ill-educated to write their own language correctly, even if they cared about the subject matter. The English journalist A.A. Gill has described marketing types as "the head lice of society". Not just them!