Enterprise resource planning failures are almost commonplace by now. Nonetheless, they can be extremely costly in terms of wasted time, money and an IT group's goodwill within an organization. Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Services put together a review of this year's biggest ERP failures.

New York City's CityTime project can be considered an "ERP project failure of the decade," Kanaracus writes. The effort to update the city's payroll system has led to accusations of corruption and waste on a huge scale. Several individuals involved in the initiative have been charged with fraud. Originally priced at about $60 million, the project so far has reached a reported $700 million. 

Meanwhile, in Marin County, Calif., officials decided to "rip and replace" a faltering SAP initiative rather than try to fix its problems. The county sued Deloitte Consulting, the systems integrator, charging that it used inexperienced workers and put in a system worse than the legacy system--charges Deloitte has denied. Rather than spending an estimated $49.8 million to fix the problems and improve the system, the county decided to start from scratch for $26.2 million.

In what Kanaracus calls "one of the ugliest ERP project legal battles in memory," this year SAP settled a lawsuit brought by Waste Management in 2008. The company said it spent more than $100 million on the project, and SAP ended up agreeing to a one-time cash payment of an undisclosed sum.

In another ERP-related legal battle, Pet food manufacturer Sunshine Mills was awarded $61 million by an Alabama jury in a lawsuit against Ross Systems, which is a subsidiary of CDC Software. Sunshine Mills accused the vendor of tricking it by demonstrating software that ended up not working in practice. The case got mean when a Ross employee called Sunshine employees "clueless fools" in an internal email.

For more:
- see Chris Kanaracus' article at CIO magazine

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