Lots of people posting AC here.
Looks like a great ERP Marketing opportunity to me.
So all the usual causes of project failure (PHB Hubris, very ambitious timelines, badly defined goals, poor availability of domain experts to point out where they were f**king up etc).
Is SAP big? Yes, as is any suite that offers comparable functions (which are wide and deep).
Perhaps they should have started with a simpler question.
Which ERP system maps the best to our business? Because it looks like they did "Everyone else is using SAP, we should as well." But then they didn't talk to any of the "Everyone else" who'd done it. Which might have told them "Yeah we got it working, but you got to watch XXX (specific implementation area/process) like a hawk if you don't want it to fail."
I think it's only the US litigation and transparency laws that gave us even this level of insight into what happened.
I reckon there was plenty of fail to go round. But you hire cheap con-tractors shouldn't you expect trouble?