I've been working with SAP this year at work, and yesterday morning I had an epiphany about the nature of the whole business. It all just seemed so frenetic and random, but then this vision came to me as I was driving into work yesterday at the end of another week of insanity.

We used to have an ERP system running on a mainframe (sorry, Matt), and then we got SAP. It was quite a change. And with this new software system, we also got SAP consultants. Lots of them. It all seemed wrong, but now I understand.

SAP is like cancer. Our ERP body used to function reasonably well, and then we got SAP. It invaded everything and silently ate everything in sight and appropriated all assets for its own purposes. So we got consultants. SAP consultants are like chemotherapy. You only need them because you got SAP. They are poison, but you use them to try to manage SAP. It kind of works, but you have to be careful or the cure might be worse than the disease. You can die from too much chemo, so you have to make sure that you only get as much as you need (or can stand) else instead of dying from cancer, you'll die from chemotherapy.

cancer:chemotherapy::SAP:consultants

I need a break from the chemo.