[osrec]

That is an unbelievable amount of money to waste on a cancelled project. It's funny how these turn into an ego thing for the project owner. If the person in charge has good links and reputation, they can keep getting funding year on year, even when the project has gone bad. Usually they are good talkers, but bad executors and have been at a firm for a significant number of years (so people think twice about firing them because of the severance package alone). I've seen this at every investment bank I've worked in, with projects racking up GBP 40m in spend before getting canned. I suppose it uplifts the GDP at least...

[consp]

Looks like they canceled it in the testing phase and noticed it simply didn't work or under performed. With those very expensive consultant hires (SAP is notoriously expensive, both licensing and consulting) it might have been cheaper to cancel it outright then to dragging it along. I applaud their idea to do it in house as they are big enough to have IT/Supply line software as a core principle which can save you money in the end, and not as an external expense which is just an annoyance.

[lowkeyokay]

I think it has to with peoples inherent lack of discounting sunk costs. “We have already spent X amount. We must make sure it isn’t wasted, so let’s spend Y more and see if that’ll fix it”. At least they pulled the plug.

[vertex-four]

It often isn’t clear that spending Y more won’t fix it, or that spending Z on a new project will - by the time you’re anywhere near half a billion euros into a project you’ve already worked around an incredible amount of unforeseen issues, lost cultural knowledge about them once they’re fixed, and there’s every chance that those issues (or more) will show up again if you start from scratch.

[osrec]

Yeah, it's like a trade you refuse to cut in the hope it may turn around some day!