I've used some SAP-based solutions a few times and the closest experience I can relate it to is late 90s MS Access applications: Everything takes ages. Things that should be easy and quick (e.g. viewing a related record or item) are often difficult and take time. Every form of search function doesn't really work, even with perfect input data. Searching doesn't work if your input is slightly off (e.g. names in wrong order or a typo). Searching takes much longer than makes sense in any sensible manner.
Of course, user's experiences don't matter when selling or supporting a software like this. I don't think it's part of the decision maker's conscious that usability (in the sense of being able to accomplish tasks efficiently) for a software that will be used by a larger part of the corporate workforce might be important not only for the employees using it, but also for the company. These systems can eat up so much work time of employees and create so many issues within a company and in customer or supplier relations...
One of the reasons companies adopt software like SAP is to replace process expertise with software. If a highly paid process expert accomplishes a task in half the time a poorly paid person accomplishes the same task with SAP, SAP wins if the poorly paid person makes half as much as the well paid one.
Also there is a question of scalability - the supply of smart people is limited and depending on smarts is risky. Hiring people that may even be smart when that's not required and that can't do any damage because the software prevents them from doing it will scale better than having to hire only smart people to operate more flexible software.
> One of the reasons companies adopt software like SAP is to replace process expertise with software. If a highly paid process expert accomplishes a task in half the time a poorly paid person accomplishes the same task with SAP, SAP wins if the poorly paid person makes half as much as the well paid one.
Assuming SAP is free both to license and implement. From what I've heard of SAP installations, that's rather far from the normal case.
> If you replace a thousand people who earn a thousand more than their replacements, you made a million right there.
Well, no, doing some quick research, because SAP annual license costs are substantially > $1000 per user, you've lost something like at least half a million and potentially several million in that case. Just considering license fees, and not other SAP-related costs.
Of course, user's experiences don't matter when selling or supporting a software like this. I don't think it's part of the decision maker's conscious that usability (in the sense of being able to accomplish tasks efficiently) for a software that will be used by a larger part of the corporate workforce might be important not only for the employees using it, but also for the company. These systems can eat up so much work time of employees and create so many issues within a company and in customer or supplier relations...