[ineedasername]

>should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong

That depends. I’ve seen a lot of adaptation to processes that are legitimately & measurably better in time & accuracy ignored in favor of costly customizations out of nothing more than “not created here” syndrome. If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team.

Otherwise, if you have been adapting your current business processes to deal with the limitations of a legacy system first deployed in the early 80's then there's an excellent chance that at least some of those things can be done more easily in a more modern system. (Though SAP may not always be the best place for that to actually be the case).

[vain_cain]

>If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team

Correct. This is the problem my company solves. We are ERP consultants/dev's who also know web development. Through the years we've made 50+ web apps to extend Microsoft's ERP, most of which can be used in most companies with similar needs with slight modifications.

And, of course you don't blindly follow a process. There's always some improvements to be made to the process before developing an app for it.

EDIT: Drastically changing workflows for employees within huge companies will ultimately almost always cost you more... It all depends on the company of course, but we have to generalize a bit.

[LurkerAtTheGate]

This is the same niche I fell into - building applications to standardize the work happening parallel to SAP because it didn't cover the edge cases, and people created their own workflows using mostly spreadsheets passed around. Which, comically, our client eventually bought another enterprise piece of software to cover our niche. We figured the gig was up...that was 5 years ago. Turns out the new enterprise software covers only a tiny fraction of the edge cases, so ours just keeps chugging along, paying the bills.