[alkonaut]

There is a bit of uniqueness that companies actually have, and the rest of “how we do things” and “what our processes are” is basically a symptom of inertia and - how the last system worked. It will turn out that every process and every structure is influenced by the system that is used. They are one. So the idea of customizing a business system to fit a business doesn’t exist - in reality it’s often customizing it to fit whatever the last system did (to processes and structures), which is something else, and not nearly as great sounding an ideaas “tailoring a system to our unique business” The key is to identify what parts of the process are “how we always did things, but for no apparent reason” which probably turns out to be a lot of things. It’s painful because it causes a lot of turmoil when everyone has to question every process. But it’s good pain.

I’m strongly agreeing with the GP: it’s both better and cheaper to at least meet half way with software like this. It’s simpler to change processes than to customize business systems.

What becomes painful is that the deployment of some new business system now became a massive reorganization and a complete overhaul of all business processes. But this is still less painful than customizing SAP to any large degree.