News & Views

July 5, 2010 from Panorama Consulting Group – “When working with clients, we often hear the perception that most ERP failures or lawsuits must pertain to SAP implementations. After all, Hershey’s, Waste Management, and a host of other high-visibility failures involved SAP’s ERP software. However, our research shows that there is no pattern to ERP failures and lawsuits, other that they happen more often than they should and no one ERP vendor appears more or less likely to experience failure than the others.

For example, two new lawsuits were announced in the last 30 days: one against Oracle and another against JDA’s i2 unit.

In fact, we looked at the most recent lawsuits to see if there was a pattern among vendors and software solutions. As you will see in the table below, there is no apparent pattern to the vendors named in recent legal matters. If anything, when expressed as a percentage of total client base, SAP and Oracle probably have a lower lawsuit rate than other vendors on the list. However, because large and high-visibility companies are more likely to embark on Oracle or SAP implementations, those organizations are more likely to receive attention when something goes awry…”

180 View – Panorama is a competitor to 180 Systems but we thought that their research was interesting enough to include their article. The 1^st impression about the article is that there are not that many lawsuits when you look at their “Lawsuits Against ERP Vendors” chart. You will see that there are 4 in 2009, 1 in 2008, 0 in 2007, 2 in 2006, 0 in 2005, 1 in 2004, 2 in 2003, 0 in 2002…  I would have expected more despite the comment by Panorama that “that there is no pattern to ERP failures and lawsuits, other that they happen more often than they should.” Our perspective is that things are getting better as a result of lessons learned and better software. There are articles linked to each lawsuit and one of them contained the following insight “Buyers should make sure to “do due diligence not only on the vendor’s software but on the consulting organization that will be delivering services, whether the vendor’s own consultants or a third-party. Interview the proposed project manager and key consulting staff”