> How would they even do that in a huge international organisation. The challenge would be mind boggling and it's almost certain the thousands of humans involved would make a mess of it.

As a result of a job search in Belgium a few years ago, I can add some thoughts:

There's a free open source competitor to SAP called Odoo.

It's been growing in scale for over 20 years.

There are companies that offer to help convert businesses over from SAP or set up with odoo to begin with.

Odoo is surprisingly successful for SMEs and mid-sized companies that don't like the expense/licensing/complexity of SAP.

It started as a tiny open source project, currently a multi-billion dollar company, though privately held. But estimated at e.g. $5-10bn.

The main advantages of Odoo are:

- it costs less, including support teams

- being open source, it can be customised to any unique business needs very easily

- possibly a slightly faster integration time for new companies

- you can upgrade entirely on your own schedule*, for existing customers.

* this is more of a problem than you might think. In the gamedev world, Godot has been taking market share from Unity continually over time because of this issue.

May be worth looking into this further yourself, I've not looked at Odoo in a few years.

TRS