What it changed
- SAP ERP configured for large, publicly listed companies.
- A first-hand understanding of enterprise software, large organisations and the consulting industry.
- The conviction behind our work: software should adapt to the business.
The situation
My first exposure to enterprise software and to consulting: configuring SAP ERP systems for large, publicly listed companies. ERP is the system that runs a company's finance, purchasing, inventory and operations, and SAP is the biggest name in it.
What it was like
Candidly, by far the worst job of my career. The complexity, the rigidity and the cost of enterprise ERP implementations, and the often inhuman way they treated the people who had to use them, nearly made me abandon IT altogether.
I watched organisations spend fortunes reshaping themselves to fit a rigid platform: changing processes that worked because the software couldn't accommodate them, and automating processes that didn't work, because nobody had stopped to fix them first.
What it taught me
It was invaluable, precisely because of that. It taught me how large organisations really run, how enterprise software gets sold and implemented, and what goes wrong in between. It gave me the belief I've built every system on since: software should adapt to the business, not force the business into expensive, inflexible processes. And fix the process before you automate it.
Today, AI makes that belief practical. Bespoke software used to be a luxury only large budgets could afford, which is why rigid packages won. With agentic programming, a system built around how your business actually works costs a fraction of what it did.
Why it matters to you
If you're facing a big-platform implementation, or living with one that bends your business out of shape, I've seen it from the inside. Sometimes the package is right. Often, a simpler process and a system built around it are cheaper, faster and kinder to the people who use it.