Well, management did. Every other phrase they uttered was "The old system did it this way" or "I used to just press F2". The pushback to learning something new was unreal.
Nevermind the fact that multi-step processes were reduced to a simple button click. Or that inventory and customer management were orders of magnitude better. The old system!! The old system did it another way!
The same with the parent commenter's thoughts, "Sure, developers can screw up [business transformation projects], but they cannot make them succeed."
More generally, a good way to botch a business transformation project is to select technical solutions without a keen grasp of how they fit your business need, and to bullheadedly stick with those solutions as friction is revealed with the business needs.
Both distorting the business around vendor software and ending up continuously fighting with the vendor software throughout th effort (both of which are commonly cited “how to fail” routes) are clear (though superficially opposite) symptoms of that same failure occurring upstream in the process.
- From the ERP end: you want it to be as flexible as possible so that it can reflect how the business actually operates and should operate in the future
- From the organization's end: you want to identify not only how the business currently operates, but how you would want it to operate in an ideal world