At the ASUG Indiana conference November 13th, ASUG management asked attendees to share their experiences by posting their notes on the “Wall of Pain”. I raised my hands and suggested that ASUG should change the name to Wall of Joy”.
Should the SAP journey be painful for customers? Unfortunately, this has been true for most customers. Implementing an enterprise ERP system like SAP is a journey with a steep learning curve, a journey full of struggles. How did it go wrong? There are many reasons. On one side, we often blame organizations and their people, claiming they are inept to change; on another side, we often allege that ERP systems like SAP are inflexible and complicated or often simply not cool to work with. So for most customers, they could easily post many pain points on the “wall of pain”.
However, in the end, for absolutely majority of organizations, the ERP journey leads them to success and to measurable productivity gains. So the pain points on the wall are lessons learned, and most of them can be classified as bragging points, as they were associated with successes big and small. They are great learning points offering insights to the complicated systems.
To be continued…
Eric Kang
