Benefits of SAP implementation :

Benefits to the suppliers :

1) SAP increases their market share and , increased business by virtue of AMCs.
2) Implementer gets business and people working at client side will build their resume.
3) Hardware manufacturer gets their share of business without any effort.

Clients :

1) Efficient , user specific, customized legacy system dies. Along with all the trained people to manage it will also loose their importance and gets demotivated.
2) Increased cost of IT by virtue of Initial expenditure on SAP licenses/ Hardware/ Net working & implementation. recurring costs /year goes up by virtue of AMC for SAP licenses and support
3) Entire Company performance goes down. Each person puts the blame on SAP for not working properly,
4) Trained manpower in SAP leaves the company in search of better (  ? ) opportunities leaving the systems department in disarray . This puts more dependence on support from AMC ( which is a mirage and clients pay heavy price )
5) One year post go live, with great difficulty , companies finalise accounts and have nightmarish times explaining the auditors. 
6) Educated end users will find out lots of open ends in various clearing accounts. Due to pressure from Sr.Management, they try to pass manual entries and end up in differential account balances. ( simple inventory statement form MC.1 does not tally with sum  of corresponding GL accounts )
7) End user start raising tickets on supports for flimsy issues consuming precious AMC hours
8) End of one year, the Sr management will realise that only 30 % of their actual business process were mapped in SAP and to full fill their other business needs, they need to go for other licenses in SAP modules --- more expenditure......!
9) Middle of second year, the database growth will increase and Size of Hardware needs up gradation...leading to more expenditure
10) Release notes for SAP will constantly put customised report updating..at client end. ( hope they have trained manpower to tackle it )
11) List of reports on MIS increases. End users reluctance to accept SAP reports puts more pressure on MIS
12) every transaction will be recorded which includes the mistake done by end users . All the mistakes done by respective users of MM/SD/PP ends at accounts department for answers.
13) End users and Sr management will realise that old system  legacy ) was better and was answering to their needs with few  exceptions like inter connectivity, web etc.
14) Dependency of legacy system and mapping it to SAP will produce replica of legacy system in the form of SAP ...! This leads to fact that all the features of SAP will never comes to light and implementers will package legacy system in SAP and run away with money.  This happens at most of clients. Where all the minus of legacy systems reappears in SAP too...! ( why do you need to spend millions to get what you had earlier ..! )

Real benefits ( seen and appreciated by very very very few clients )
1) one data flows across all domains
2) Visibility of data
3) Visibility of inventory/accounts/MIS for better control
4) Planning and automated working avoiding procedural hurdles for various domains like purchase/production/sales etc 
5) Inter-connectivity with other applications of PDM/SCM/CRM/ bla bla bla.....

Related:

• What is SAP - Overview
• What is SAP Production Support - Ticket Resolving
• Implement SAP - Scope of Work

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SAP Hints and Tips on Configuration and ABAP/4 Programming