Enterprise Resourse Planning

[mandolin666]

At work I am obliged to use Windows and MS Office; to add to the misery of this we are now experiencing the trauma of a large scale enterprise SAP implementation. My work function is not IT but I am exposed to all the various systems to carry out my job function (process engineering). My colleagues and I are all of the opinion that not only is the whole SAP process hateful to experience as an employee but is actually pretty harmful to the company's bottom line; in our view there is something of 'The Emperor's New Software' about the whole thing. Many large organisations go through the implementation at huge cost and end up tied in by licence to SAP to such an extent that the only outcome is that it had to be a success story; money and consultants are thrown at the project until it finally works but the cost and the havoc wreaked on the ongoing business are very probably larger than the benefits that the solution brings. As an employee we also seem to find that the IT tail is wagging the production dog rather than the other way around. It is very frustrating and we spend more time that we should moaning about.
Today I decided to see if I could do something about it and throw down a gauntlet to the open source community; can an online group come together and create a scaleable, effective, stable, and truly awe inspiring ERP solution to beat the SAP peddlars at their own game. Do any of you have a view on this, is it a pipe dream or can we actually do this, please let me know.