[roflc0ptic]

fully agree, think what you're saying is a misread of my comment. GP said "literally everyone says this thing is bad." My comment was "Well, clearly there were people not telling them [or else they'd probably have stopped short of $500,000,000 in expenditures]".

Your comment is a mechanistic explanation of the failure mode, which again, I quite agree with. I worked at PwC for a couple of years; quite corrupt incentive structures and quite a dysfunctional organization because of it.

[taway19920706]

Yes, fair point - I didn't explain myself clearly (I've been commenting too much in this thread as it is!). My thinking is that why would they speak up? Lidl has deep pockets so the thinking was probably "another $5/10/20 million will get the project over the line". Not looking at the project and saying "we've billed you so much already, we've delivered something that's not fit for purpose so we'll absorb some of that and get something that works".

For all its faults, SAP is the market leader ERP. Without knowing anything more than what I've read in the general press, I'm fairly confident that the implementation could have been a success.