Another unique ERP instance
I wonder how many ERPs are being run by central governments and their quangos? Let's not get into the horrific duplication and mess in the local government space.
Britain's biggest nuclear site skips competition, hands SAP £33M to start ERP switch
The government-owned company that runs the UK's most important nuclear site has begun plans to replace its legacy SAP ERP – mainstream support for which ends in 2027 – via a £33 million award to the German vendor, without competition. In an official document published earlier this month, Sellafield Limited, which runs the site …
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Friday 10th April 2026 10:30 GMT Missing Semicolon
Cowards duped by salesmen
What SAP have not mentioned is that the ECC migration to the latest cloudy stuff will also "require wholesale process redesign across finance, procurement, warehousing, and HR, as well as extensive data, integration, and control rebuilds...". It will cost way more than £33m. And it will fail to deliver many features they have been relying on. Ask Birmingham about that one.
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Friday 10th April 2026 14:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Removed from reality
I just struggle to understand how basic ERP - at its core a sales ledger, P&L sheet, asset sheet, and an HR employee list - so a spreadsheet with a few tabs, possibly with some simple linkage, spirals out of control into these multi-million or billion £pound systems, and how, faced with the many well--publicised debacles, organisations continue to throw money at SAP and Oracle in particular. There must be a better way?
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Friday 10th April 2026 15:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: There must be a better way?
There is a better way. The problem is that no one can find the Holy Grail of this challenge. If you do find it then you would not be posting here instead, you would be hob-nobbing with the likes of Musk, Bezos, Zuck and Trump.
If it was me, I'd tell them to FSCK off and get a life while I took their businesses to the cleaners.
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Saturday 11th April 2026 11:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Unique challenges
Whilst I'm not a fan of SAP and S/4HANA, there are certain management challenges which are more or less unique to Sellafield.
They are one of my customers for the past 20 years hence I'm staying anonymous.
Just the management of different types and activities of wastes are a nightmare plus the complex management and training and validation of the myriad of contractors who work on the site.
Then there is the security aspect of which there are several levels including Developed Vetting (I've been done and it's a long process!), monitoring of personnel exposure to radiation (think film badges which are routinely monitored). Then you have the complex environmental issues which are also IIRC managed under SAP.
I would say that Sellafield have taken a sensible decision here as switching to another system / supplier would be even worse than moving to SAP SaaS.
I do however, totally agree with a previous anonymous coward that I am baffled as to how it has been made so complicated!
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Saturday 11th April 2026 17:06 GMT Roland6
Re: Unique challenges
> I am baffled as to how it has been made so complicated!
It’s a single system, hence you can’t upgrade one part without upgrading all parts at the same time…
Never been a fan of single vendor wall-to-wall enterprise systems solutions, much preferred more focused systems integrated through EAI middleware. But the sales people at the monolith ERP vendors will tell you at length about how bad this approach is compared to their monolithic lock-in solution… The only downside with my approach is that you do have more procurements and suppliers and hence elevated costs.
As for security, I would hope they are deploying S/4HANA in its on premise version rather than cloud and have demanded SAP commit to easy upgrade/replacement for a rolling 999 years given the long-term nature of their business…
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