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

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

The architect and I wrote up a presentation which implied the SAP upgrade would fix nothing.

Our solution was to enforce a common interface on suppliers to send only identifiers and timing signals into the B2B gateway. Remove the risk of a parser failure by forcing suppliers into a common standard.

The project manager didn't like our slide show, the resident genius wanted me gone so I happily agreed to leave because I was pretty sure this was a train-wreck.  The senior architect left a few months later.

The manager grimaced at my eagerness to exit and called me the following week.  But I'd already left. The senior architect called a month later to tell me the project was suspended and "under review".