In lawsuits regarding the failure of ERP implementations, it is a universal constant that there will be finger pointing between the customer and the implementer/provider as to with whom the blame resides for the failure. For obvious reasons, there are strong incentives to settle before these disputes are aired in the very public forum of litigation, but notwithstanding those incentives a surprising number of failed ERP lawsuits still proceed to trial. What are even rarer, however, are failed ERP lawsuits between the prime contractor and their subcontractor. This presentation reviews one of those tripartite lawsuits triggered by a ERP project failure, and highlights lessons learned on a variety of key issues, including (a) when a project management role is assigned to a subcontractor, the importance of highlighting where the scope of this role ends and the customer’s management role begins; (b) whether breaches for which the customer has already been provided relief by the provider can be revisited by the customer upon termination; and (c) the critical importance of contemporaneously documenting breaches.
