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Horror Stories

Anonymised war stories from the SAP trenches. Therapeutic reading. Occasionally instructive.

01

$4M implementation. Go-live delayed 14 months. The consultant had never touched S/4HANA.

We didn't find out until week 6 that our lead consultant's "S/4HANA experience" was a 3-day certification course taken the previous month…

S/4HANAImplementationConsulting847
02

Transport moved to production on a Friday afternoon. Payroll stopped running.

The basis team assured us it was "just a config change." 2,200 employees didn't get paid that week. The change had modified a payroll schema variant…

PayrollTransports612
03

Our authorization concept was a single role. For everyone. Including finance.

Inherited a system where the previous BASIS admin had solved the access request backlog by creating SAP_ALL equivalents for every department…

AuthorizationAudit Risk501
04

The client's "test system" was actually connected to the live bank feed.

72 hours after go-live we noticed outbound payment files were being generated in what was supposed to be QA. Nobody had changed the RFC destinations…

FinanceRFCTesting438
05

We ran SE38 in production to "just check something". It wasn't SE38.

The transaction had been remapped in the customising. What we thought was a display program was a background job launcher with no confirmation dialog…

BASISABAP389
06

Year-end close failed because someone had deleted a number range interval in November.

The deletion had been done by a consultant during a "routine cleanup" of test data three weeks earlier. The missing range only became relevant on Dec 31…

FinanceYear-EndNumber Ranges321