# Configuring SAP for listed companies, and nearly quitting IT

> My first job in enterprise software: configuring SAP ERP for large, publicly listed companies. By far the worst job of my career, and the most formative: it's why we build software that adapts to the business, not the other way round.

- Client: Large publicly listed companies, through an enterprise consultancy (Enterprise software)
- Role: SAP ERP consultant, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Delivered. Early career
- Capabilities: Enterprise software, ERP, Consulting
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/sap-erp/

## Outcomes

- 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.

## Built with

- SAP ERP
- Business process configuration

## Related

- [Cloudless Labs, the business behind this site](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/cloudless-labs/index.md): a related project
- [ERP, CRM and order management whose biggest customer was DHL](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/crm-for-dhl/index.md): a related project
- [Every project](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md)
- [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md)
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)