It seems as if nearly every week, a major business or technology publication carries an article about migrating processes to the cloud. In many circumstances, this makes sense for a range of very good reasons. But for users of ERP software systems, migrating a very complicated and sophisticated management tool with countless “moving parts” to…
Massive and costly failures of corporate ERP software system installations and integrations are becoming legendary. Nearly every week comes news of another train wreck. But as the public sector adopts ERP to serve a variety of purposes ever-more frequently, digital transformations are carrying a growing number of risks for government entities. In June, 2019, we…
The general counsel at any sized company knows how to draft everything from employment contracts and leases to complicated sales agreements. But few are familiar with what Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems actually do let alone the traps lurking in these types of contracts. This isn’t surprising given that the lifespan of most ERP…
We often write about the mounting number of failed digital transformations, especially those involving an ERP software system. More often than not, the underlying cause of the failures involve either the vendor or integrator biting off more than they can chew. They misrepresent the capability of their ERP system or their experience at integrating a…
Three court cases reveal the importance of ensuring that contracts for an ERP software system and other digital transformations be carefully negotiated and drafted to remove the possibility that a lawsuit over a failure can be blocked by a seemingly harmless clause that vendors and integrators insert as a matter of routine in their template…
After retiring from a wildly successful career running Ford and then saving Chrysler from bankruptcy, Lee Iacocca was asked by an interviewer how American automakers could have allowed their globally dominant position in the market to be eroded by foreign car companies. Iacocca replied, “There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success.” It’s not just…
Over the years, we’ve documented numerous cases of the failures of ERP software systems and other digital transformations; in some of them, we litigated the dispute on behalf of a client. In many instances, the blow-up resulted from a combination of factors where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Some of the failures…
About 20 years ago, commercials for a food product used the tag line “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” By mid-June, 2019, the line was adaptable to warn, “It’s not nice for a software vendor to fool a state government.” In yet another example of a software vendor’s sales team overpromising and underdelivering with…
When an ERP software system implementation fails, sometimes it’s because the vendor told a potential buyer that its round peg would fit into the user’s square hole in order to make the sale. But maybe even more often, the failure is because the integrator either did not fully understand the user’s industry or business, the…
The failure of ERP software systems often prompts a lawsuit to be filed by the user against the vendor and integrator. But a new twist in trying to recover damages from an ERP failure surfaced in May 2019, when Revlon Inc. shareholders filed three class action suits again the cosmetics giant to recover money they…