{The message I wanted to reply to, the single line quoted below, apparently was deleted while I typed it, so... sorry for the missing context and the long rambl

{The message I wanted to reply to, the single line quoted below, apparently was deleted while I typed it, so... sorry for the missing context and the long rambling rant. } > SAP implements the workflow of their costumers (the process is called "tailoring"), No. It implements workflows that one of the consultancy layers comes up with after having meetings with the wrong-inhouse people, because in big corporations there's politics involved about who gets to be responsible for the future processes to be implemented, by newly formed departments, with managers and budget and so on. I'd be the first guy to endorse the point that a central accounting, order, inventory-managing, ... system is indispensable for any big shop, but the current way of getting this kind of "mission critical" software into big corporations is just a huge clusterfuck. Office politics more or less guarantee that the system will sabotage the work of the majority of employees, and I cannot even blame SAP for that ;-). I worked in a >10'000 people engineering company (huge industrial plants) for three years which matches roughly the timeframe that SAP was introduced. I've witnessed pretty hillarious in-house advertising campaigns (video clips, posters, giveaways, mascots) to raise acceptance of the new software and meaningless presentations justifying millions of wasted $ (€) offset by future increase of efficiency. There were funny titles given to specially trained ("power user", I'm not kidding you) colleagues and in the end, complete confusion about how to work with what was given and a inhouse support staff no longer able to cope with all the problems after the hive of consultants, trainers and specialists went to assault the next company. We had it all: Three digit months-entry fields, to be able to cope with future expansions (not kidding), thousands of people trained in creating multi-billion-dollar-project structures inside SAP, yet unable to order a €10 part. Billable-hour forms with a complicated permission hierarchy, that nevertheless did not detect people charge other random accounts, sometimes by accident. In the end people developed mitigation strategies, so work can continue with only minor handicaps, inhouse departments get praised for "successful" implementation of the systems, rewards are paid out, but a lot of the promised advantages fail to materialize.