SAP is hideous. The interface is hideous. The server back end software is hideous. Only an accountant could love it, and far too often, the accountants are put in charge of selecting it.

SAP tends to be a catch-22. It works great if you can keep it exclusively within the realm of the accounting department, but once its entrenched there, the accountants tend to do everything in their power to have it adopted by the rest of the business.

Some of the examples I could recite for you are so ludicrous, for example, in my former organization, 55-year old high school dropout skilled tradespeople with no computer literacy skills were sent on 2 month courses just to learn how to enter a timesheet. Every two weeks I would lose a good 2-3 hours of productivity from these skilled tradesmen because they would be struggling to enter their time into SAP so they could get paid. Not a big deal in the dead of winter when they sit around doing nothing, or work on their own personal projects on company time, but hugely wasteful in the summer months when they should be out working and enjoying the fresh air instead.

Of course, as a lower-level manager, I was essentially told just to keep my mouth shut about this ludicrous waste of resources, 'in the name of progress' even though my employees' productivity directly affected not only my performance bonus, but also my performance reviews. Not only that, but employee morale and productivity fell even further because there was a complete lack of trust between the union and management on the system implementation, and with several hundred payroll errors every month due to the improperly implemented system, the union had every right to feel that their membership was being harassed through the system. (sounds like AC, eh??)