[bob778]

As an insider of the automated manufacturing space, your ERP analogy is good but missing one detail: every other large company eventually gets an ERP working. Tesla is an outlier in regard to their manufacturing processes and even much lower margin industries tend to design new factories around the automation platform yet Tesla just...doesn't?

I've never worked with Tesla so have no inside info on their situation but their factory designs have always seemed strange to me - like they refuse to follow industry norms.

[techdragon]

Not entirely invalidating your point, but it’s worth keeping in mind how many organisations will publicly declare an ERP project has been “finished successfully” in various PR channels, while staff will be stuck shouldering the burden to maintain duct tape and bailing wire hacks for a few years as the ERP that was “finished successfully” has in reality only met 40-80% of its original goals, the project having been either quietly rescoped or just “finished early to the satisfaction of all parties” or any number of other PR bullshit phrases.

I’ve personally witnessed a couple if “successfully deployed ERP projects” which were in reality complete shit shows to the point where lawsuits were considered, and it was only the good old fashioned grease of the professional consultants who started getting worried this might haunt them in the next job after they quit, that kept the gears turning and stopped things getting that far. One of these was barely 50% of originally promised scope, downscoped twice and “successfully completed” 5 years before the internal teams who took over when the consultants were kicked out, gave up and told management they couldn’t deliver and and a new solution should be put to tender.

Oracle and IBM and SAP and the like may be able to always end up delivering, but plenty of clients will walk away partially down the road due to going bankrupt or merging or any one of a number of outcomes because the massive vendors that will “always deliver” might take so long to get there that you can basically just call it what it is, a practical failure… if an ERP is installed in a company but no one ever uses it, was it even deployed?

[MarkMarine]

More silly than that. It’s like saying they can’t get ERP from Oracle or whomever to work, so they are going to build their own ERP from scratch, it’ll do more and be 1/1000 the price.