In 2008 I was assigned to a major IT manufacturer that suffered a million $$ supply chain failure. Their resident 25-year-old genius laid out a SAP upgrade as a solution and my company won a sub-contract.

I wandered around the campus for a few days and found a senior architect who blamed the failure on the recent removal of XML schemas so I investigated further. Large daily uploads with proprietary formats were fed into a huge switch (10,000 "IF..THEN" clauses) which parsed out signals to trigger sub-orders.

We wrote up a presentation (partly shown here) which implied the SAP upgrade was pointless and the proper fix is an enforced interface for suppliers to send timing signals, which removes the risk of a parser failure caused by a rogue supplier.

The project manager disliked our slide show and the genius wanted me gone so I happily agreed to leave. I was pretty sure this was an impending train-wreck.

The manager had grimaced at my eagerness to quit and called me the following week but I was already gone, baby! The senior architect told me a month later that the project was suspended and "under review". He quit a few weeks later.