[wenc]

As the other commenters have noted, none of the offerings in the large-scale ERP space are "good" for most measures of good, but they tend to be good enough to keep things operational. SAP is reputedly the least bad vendor in this space (we use a competing system and it is much worse).

ERPs are tedious, uninspiring, production-level software that have to deal with all manners of ill-defined business rules and variations. It's almost impossible to come up with an elegant product because the problem space itself is inelegant and in many cases irreducibly so. I imagine it's hard to attract talented developers (except those solely attracted to money) to this space because the feedback loop and intellectual payoff is so unrewarding. Most of the time the implementation problems have to do with human problems, not technical ones. Most ERP customization is outsourced to pools of fungible labor.

But when you run a large enterprise, ERPs are absolutely necessary, so someone's gotta do it.

[nraynaud]

Can't they split the project and try to introduce the tool or fail by pieces? I know management and sales wants big figures to compute a mass discount and be in the press, but in the nitty gritty, isn't it better to screw up only part of the company?

[mbesto]

Yes - most roll-outs will do phase approaches (unclear if Lidl did this or not). A good strategy is to do a smaller country roll-out for example, learn all of the lessons and then roll it out elsewhere. It's however not a blanket strategy and requires context to decide which is the right way.

[hibbelig]

Lidl rolled it out in the smaller countries, learned the lesson that it's not going to work, and stopped it.

[quikoa]

What I find crazy is that it still took 500M to figure that out.

[rbanffy]

It took that much for all levels of management involved to admit it was hopeless and for the top level to ax them.