VIM implementations fail on organizational and governance gaps more often than on the technology. The recurring causes we see are weak executive sponsorship, excessive customization, poor vendor master data, thin change management, under-trained users, and treating go-live as the finish line. Those gaps rarely crash a system. What they produce is a deployment that technically runs while users work around it: validation steps quietly skipped, approvals handled in email, reports that nobody opens, and a widening gap between the configured process and the real one.
PetSmart's original VIM environment had accumulated 235 custom objects before we reimplemented the platform and reduced that number to 27. Each object seemed justified when it was built; together they blocked upgrades, inflated support cost, and hid standard functionality that had caught up in the meantime. When a customization is genuinely needed, it should be built as a copy of the standard object rather than a modification of it, so upgrades stay possible. Vendor master data quality is the other common failure source, because bad master data manufactures exceptions no workflow design can absorb. Two more habits separate durable deployments from fragile ones: keeping design and as-built documentation somewhere the team of five years from now can find it, and planning hypercare plus a scheduled optimization review instead of releasing the delivery partner at go-live.