It exactly feels like you are telling the story of my previous company. Although they started using SAP because company was going public and it E&Y advised company to implement SAP. Implementation was never successful. Day to day productivity greatly suffered. You had to do things SAP way, regardless of it being right or wrong. There were training sessions every weekend. Even trainers were confused. Everyone was mad.
Soon after our company went public, we gave up on SAP and started doing things old ways.
my friend works ata company that is an sap partner and they are required to use some sap software (i think some helpdesk component) and they use some external software and import stuff into sap later. afaik the reason is partly how bad it is and how the licensing does not make sense.
Soon after our company went public, we gave up on SAP and started doing things old ways.