The nine circles
of ERP hell
Nobody arrives at the ninth. You descend one reasonable decision at a time, and every single step down is defensible on its own.
Limbo
The demo. Everything works, everything is beautiful, and every person in the room is very impressed. Nobody in the room does your job. You will remember this hour fondly.
Double Entry
The order exists in two places now. It will exist in two places for the rest of the contract. Somebody types it twice, every time, and nobody has ever written that job down.
The Spreadsheet Beside the System
It started as a temporary workaround for one thing. It is now load-bearing. It lives on one person's desktop and it is not backed up.
The Consultant
You pay a stranger by the hour to learn how your business works. They learn it. They do good work. Then they leave, and everything they learned leaves with them, and next year you pay to teach it to someone new.
The Feature Request
Filed. Acknowledged. Assigned a number. Referenced once, warmly, on a call. Never spoken of again by anyone.
The Upgrade
The upgrade breaks the workaround you built to survive the last upgrade. You spend a weekend on it. Nothing about your business improved; you simply held position.
The Report That Doesn't Exist
A customer needs a number the system will not produce. So somebody makes it by hand. Every week. Forever. It takes two hours and it is the most important two hours nobody has ever costed.
The Ceiling
You stop proposing changes. Not because you ran out of ideas — because the answer has been no long enough that you've stopped asking. This is the dangerous one, because nothing breaks. You just quietly stop getting better.
The Renewal
You sign again. Not because it's good. Because the only thing worse than this is doing the implementation again, and they know it, and the price reflects that they know it.
Recognise more than four of these and you should probably run the numbers. Recognise all nine and I'd genuinely like to hear about it — the confession wall is right there.