Greg Crouse, managing director at Navigant Consulting, has learned all about this from inside the belly of the litigious beast, serving as an expert court witness or consultant after spending 25 years managing large-scale projects.

Twenty-one percent of companies who responded to a 2015 Panorama Consulting Solutions survey characterized their most recent ERP rollout as a failure. So there are a lot of disasters out there. But the high stakes in these projects, and the uptick in litigation, have meant that they're simultaneously more and less visible than ever. When lawsuits go public, that's a flag that there's a juicy story out there — but legal necessities often mean that the full details of the dispute never come out. "You'd have a hard time finding anyone who will talk about it — cases either litigate forever or get settled and sealed," says Crouse.

Nevertheless, here are 15 ERP flops from over the years — and some wisdom in the wreckage.

1. Vodafone: The long arm of the law

When British telecom provider Vodafone consolidated its CRM systems onto a Siebel platform, they ran into problems: not all the customer accounts migrated properly. The company didn't go out of its way to advertise this, of course, but people started to notice when their accounts weren't properly credited for payments made.

The upshot: a £4.6 million fine from the British telecom regulator. And while this incident was concluded with just the fine paid, Crouse points out that regulatory oversight can, somewhat surprisingly, lead to private litigation down the road. "If there's problems with large scale implementations, people are going to find out about it — because you have to report it to your regulator if things go bad." Whereas a company might've been previously tempted to keep quiet about the whole affair, with regulators revealing screwups, that company might decide its best bet is to cast blame on someone else through litigation.

2. Washington community college system: When third parties flop

But that litigation can go both ways. For instance, students at Washington State's community colleges have been paying a portion of their tuition every year to help the schools upgrade to a PeopleSoft ERP system that was supposed to go live in 2012. Instead, the project is still limping along. One cause of delay was internal: the 34 campuses in the system had widely varying business processes that needed to be standardized, which wasn't clear until well into the rollout.

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