"will cut its workforce by about 3,000 positions. SAP hopes to make annual savings of €300m to €350m starting in 2010."

So a simple calculation gives a salary of €100,000 per year - nice work if you can get it. I reckon that they have already started to trim their support team as I cannot get them to respond to issues raised on their support system.

OK, I'm biased - we are working with some of their consultants at the moment and it is just no longer funny. There are 4 consultants on site today - they have fixed 2 problems that were found to have been caused by them making configuration changes just before Christmas. It's only taken 6 weeks to resolve.

Meanwhile, we have received information on another problem that was first raised 8 months ago. They've decided that it can't be fixed so we have to find a work around for a specific process - one that was identified right at the beginning as a key requirement.

An announcement was made last week that we would definitely be going live with the product at the beginning of March - but I note that they didn't say which year. At the moment, we cannot process a single invoice (we've known this for almost 5 months) and they still don't know why.

Bunch of followers of Oedipus

good, their software is really just designed to create lock in, and is generally unwieldy and bloaty.

THe amazing thing is that SAP works fine out of the box with no consultants. Companies become convinced that they need consultants to implement it............................................

Even with these large IT companies are making millions and billions of dollars in PROFIT, they are laying off employees and contractors. I believe these "proactive" actions which are share price driven or taken to help the shareholders, will create more unemployment and ultimately prolong and deepen the global recession. In the end, the demand for the hardware, software and services will also drop and without doubt, so will the share price.

Perhaps whilst these companies are still making profits, not losses, it would be better to keep people employed and reallocate resources to more R&D instead.

>So a simple calculation gives a salary of €100,000 per year

No it doesn't - it gives you employee costs of EUR100,000 per year. The general calculation that I've heard said by employers is that if you double the salary, that's what it costs you to employ someone. This should cover company pension contributions (cough), admin costs, workplace costs etc. Some people vary it to 40:60 and others 60:40 although I've not worked out if that's company or occupation specific.

"The general calculation that I've heard said by employers is that if you double the salary, that's what it costs you to employ someone"

Yes and you also have NI rates etc in the UK, training, holidays, sick leave, maternity / paternity leave, canteen / coffee shop privileges, Medicare if you're in the US, all the stationery that the thieving beggars nick, the phones calls that they make on company phones to premium rate phone-ins, and all the wasted time spent on Facebook, MySpace, The Register - (perhaps not the last one as that is a legitimate research tool)

These poor employers; there is just no end of cost.

SAP are still a shite organisation with crappy software and lousy support. Getting rid of staff won't improve that, no matter how much or how little they save in the process.

I was commenting on the calculation, not whether the costs were justified or not. Having recently left a position in part because the company wouldn't pay anything into a pension fund for me, I was expected to do it all myself, then quite frankly I think all the money-grabbing bastards should be put up against the wall. However I'm not running the show.