Allegedly Rigged Product Demo In SAP Suit Goes Missing

narramissic writes "Waste Management sued SAP in March 2008 over a failed ERP project. Now, well into the pre-trial discovery process, a presale product demonstration software package that Waste Management says was a key element of the 'false representations' SAP made to 'induce Waste Management into entering a software licensing and implementation agreement' has gone missing. Naturally, both sides say the other has it. And SAP, for its part, says it has 'searched extensively' for the system and wants it 'as much or more' as Waste Management, since it 'will help SAP disprove WM's fraud claim.'"

Re:Isn't Waste Management known as sleezy

[LaRoach]

Waste Management was caught cooking the books ala Enron, Worldcom, etc: http://www.sec.gov/news/headlines/wastemgmt6.htm [sec.gov]

Re:I for one...

[jeffbruce]

You missed Stop All Production

Re:Isn't Waste Management known as sleezy

[LaRoach]

Hence the word "was" in the post...

Re:Things randomly disappearing...

[slashtivus]

Enterprise Resource Planning. It's fancy scheduling software.

Re:like every other sales demo

[TheRealMindChild]

"So I have this great Wazmo that you certainly need! It jimmies your jewels so that they hum with the harmony of a negative color! You want to buy it, we want to sell it! It is a win-win for everyone!"

That is my sales pitch... and you just bought my Wazmo. Who is the idiot?

Re:I for one...

[enogeejon]

fyi, ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning SAP = Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung which roughly translates into System Analysis and Programming. Now, since I work as a SAP BASIS (sys. admin.) administrator at a managed services hosting company so I actually get to work with multiple companies SAP landscapes daily so I can easily play devils advocate for SAP here. Maybe part of the problem for Waste Management is that they have a less than stellar implementation partner. It can easily take months for the developers to tailor SAP for the customer, often so long that you might think that writing something from the ground up makes more sense and maybe sometimes it does. Really, it depends on the scope of your business and what you really want to do and seriously, the scope of SAP is very large even without any of the add on products. However, as to losing the system, neither company should have lost it though I have my doubts that there are many IT managers who could manage to get any version of SAP installed and working on their own so the Waste Management IT Manager and their staff might just have tried to install the demo but failed and then chucked it. As I really see it though, if the business can't clearly define their needs then they are going to just end up wasting lots of money no matter what software they are working with, I have seen it with .NET, Java, and php/mysql as well as SAP.

Re:I for one...

[b4dc0d3r]

This is not funny. I work at a fortune 11x company and I know several things are true.

1) We use SAP because they made a pitch and hooked a sucker in a suit.
2) You buy SAP, then a plan to "customize" it.
3) Customize means "finish the code"
4) It also means you pay high-ranking aka high-earning business types piles of money to give requirements to SAP when a junior coder could just do the obvious and have something that works
5) The requirements you give to SAP are exactly the same as what the sales pitch said it already did

I'm sure I could go on. This is not a funny comment, it is how SAP works. Mod me scary or obvious if you want, but not funny.

I'm glad I'm not alone

[sxltrex]

I too work at a multi-billion $ per year company, and our executives also bought the SAP sales pitch hook, line, & sinker. What a stinking pile of crap. I have never seen a worse user interface. The saddest part is, no-one knows of a successful implementation, yet all of the executives who buy this shit think "my company will be the first!" They also think paying hundreds of millions of dollars to firms like Deloitte will fix everything. Dumbasses.

One of my co-workers invented SAP: The Board Game. Every card says "Lose a Turn."

Re:Things randomly disappearing...

[ikkonoishi]

Yeah sure. Here [lmgtfy.com]

Re:like every other sales demo

[diskis]

Actually software like SAP requre their own administrative/support staff. SAP is so complex (=administrative nightmare) that a company must have specialists available if they are to purchase it.
And purchasing SAP is not because of lack of technical expertise, it's because software in that scale takes years and years to develop and test. Buy it, and it's up and running in a few weeks.