I was once working with a client in the frozen foods industry, tasked with integrating their SAP S/4HANA system with Warehouse Management System (WMS). The project was in its final stages, and just before the go-live date, we were testing various scenarios to ensure everything would run smoothly. Little did I know, a minor error in my Groovy script would lead to something weird.

During the testing phase, we began sending delivery IDocs from SAP. The process seemed pretty simple, however, in my code, I did not verify the quantitites.

I soon received a call from a client representative. The reason? Their system received an order for several thousand tons of carrots. Yes, carrots. Apparently, due to a misconfiguration in my script, the system had interpreted some field values incorrectly, resulting in an astronomical order of this vegetable.

The most amusing part of the story was that this order, worth only a few euros, had triggered the dispatch of dozens of trucks filled to the brim with carrots. Imagine if this scenario was in productive system, people standing before dozens of trucks lined, ready to deliver an absurd amount of carrots.

In the end, the situation was resolved without too much trouble. The script was corrected, the delivery orders were recalibrated, and the carrots were redirected.

This experience taught me the lesson of double-checking data outputs, no matter how technical the process might be.

And of course, it left me with a funny little story that I’ll never forget - the day I accidentally ordered a mountain of carrots.