they are not worth the value but they are not a Scam . A lot of businesses need systems like this to manage their supply chain . It isn ' t 1978 anymore , people don ' t keep manual general ledgers . the issue with ERPs i lived through a deployment of Oracle is pisspoor training , having legacy staff that doesn ' t understand , well , computers in general , and management that doesn ' t understand the real capability of the system . but those systems cost millions of dollars in purchasing , training , deployment , etc . Not to mention the slowed productivity and troubleshooting in the first year or so but we did it the old way and it worked ! another issue with the ERP , at least at my old company , was it was too small for the ERP to really add value . the entire corporate umbrella was using ORacle , we were one of the last ones to deploy . So not only was it customized for other opco ' s making it a hodgepodge of manual notes because the system doesn ' t do that for us , but using it was taking more time and effort than a simple phone call or wall down the hall would do . 50 ish person company . i work for another 50 ish person company with no ERP . It ' s a hell of a lot worse without it than with it , imo . There is a massive disconnect between SR , accounting , purchasing and production is WAY off the map due to the nature of our product , it ' s mostly engineertoorder stuff we make . I believe a smaller ERP would do wonders for my company , but it ' s just too expensive to see short or even mediumterm gains .