The people buying the software don't have to use it, would you buy your corporate underlings the comfortable, expensive shoes or just enough rags to painfully remind them who their masters are?
SAP produce the lowest cost rags in town, and you will learn to love them.
There's nothing cheap about SAP. It is just the opposite. They sell the most expensive software ever for any given need. But they make sure to promise their victims that the software covers any possible business "need" under the sun, so the CTOs feel coerced to pay the hefty price.
SAP, at its core, is an ERP system. Those, in turn, run around MRP (Material Requirements Planning), all in xompliant and auditable manner (if used properly, that is). There is a reason why ERP systems rule the manufacturing world, and SAP rules ERP systems. All the chatter about CTOs going golfing with some SAP sales rep not withstanding, SAP is a very solid system and used by very sophisticated folks (ideally, if not, well, you cannot blame Red Bulls latest Formula 1 car if I crash it in turn one).
So, if you are a manufacturing business, MRP is a must and SAP an expensive but solid choice. If you are not, and thus don't need MRP and ERP, well, you wouldn't use a semi truck for your weekly groccery shopping neither.
People who only look at the UI, and then not even the UI of the core funtionality of an ERP system, and then dump on, e.g. SAP (all ERPs are the dame but different in that regard), just show that they have zero clue what those ERPs are supposed to do and how they are supposed to be used.
That’s for the golf course. Same as IBM: The business model is they mostly sell golf courses, and software is a side-effect so they have to save on that.
I was sysadmin for IBM software in a 50k-people company, there is no way they paid 12m$ for ClearQuest, ClearCase or RequisitePro when Git and Jira were already out. They clearly played golf to win this market.
SAP produce the lowest cost rags in town, and you will learn to love them.