This of course does not exonerate Waste management’s top Brass who made a $100 million mistake and allowed themselves to be fooled into thinking a prototype made for a demo show is a final working product. But then how many top brass do you know who own up to a $100 million goof up?

If you ask the consultants who make tons of money hourly they will tell you they make a good living precisely because SAP software is underdeveloped, untested and in many cases undocumented. Long live the SAP ecosystem.

To me, it sounds like WM has very little to stand on here. Most of the things they are pointing to are verbal in orientation, i.e. things you would hear at a sales demo. SAP contracts cover these types of issues, e.g. system enhancements. Now, with that being said if the system was not live in any other client before that is a different story. Clearly there are additional functions needed in the waste industry and those specifically could get called out. The rest of R/3 cannot, as it is used by 20k+ companies around the world. Again, I think WM will have a tough time with this and it sounds like they did not have their homework done. Did they even speak with other customers that implemented SAP to get an idea of what it is like? And for that matter, it does not matter if it is SAP, Oracle or some other package.

And where is Accenture in all this?!

The key to this lawsuit however must be for Waste Management to prove that the core Waste and Recylcing Software was not developed and tested to the level that SAP committed to when the contract was signed.

It is concievable that the WM management gradually discovered deficiences in the solution and in the end put the pieces together to a pattern that can only be explained by the SAP sales team having promised a level of quality higher than they should have. This is what the WM legal team needs to prove in the wheels of justice.

Friend of mine worked on this project…cited numerous examples of WM management being totally clueless…then yelling and screaming to try and get the new SAP system to do the same unworkable and broken business process their old system(s) did.

The waste business in general is filled with crooks being infested with mafioso types for years and years in big cities like NY and Chicago. Witness what’s going on right now in Naples Italy.

Why SAP thought they could change the culture of a company like WM, which implemenation of an ERP requires, shows that SAP, being a global company is also clueless about culture.

Let’s face it: trash hauling companies aren’t gonna be filled with brainiacs…and mobster’s which riddle the ranks of the rough and tumble world of the dumpster haulers ain’t really in the business of creating value for their shareholders: they are in it to skim money into their own pockets by washing illicit cash through a seemigly ligit business.

Soooo, combine the need to behave honestly to take on the painful changes ERP requires with a bunch of crooks, and ya get: failure. Surprise!