Many years ago, I was sent in to, incidentally, a major car-parts reseller - almost all car parts in the EU and UK pass through this firm. This was a family business, dad had built the business, retired, and the kids were running the place. Pretty much the first order of business for the kids was the modernisation of the IT systems.<p>My initial task was to do an assessment of who was using what, and what for, which all went really smooth, until we got to the “accounting floor”. I couldn’t get in, as the accounting team had locked the doors, and locked themselves in. Part of the modernisation was replacing the 100% Excel-based parts/accounts/supplier/customer ERP system with something that wasn’t Excel, and they simply weren’t having any of it.<p>We walked away from that project, a competitor gleefully took it over, got caught in a swamp of technical and legal complications, and lost a lot of time, money, and people.