ERP rollout at Europe's largest local council slammed
theregister.com
theregister.com
$163,000,000 spent and nothing to show for it. Of course, Oracle / SAP have absurdly powerful contracts that basically bail them out of any accountability. This is despite both of them being notorious for overruns on their projects, especially government deployments.
From a survey, 47% of ERP projects have budget overruns.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/526423/worldwide-erp-imp...
When you have this many problems in government deployments, it goes from "oopsie doopsie" to "government budget milking machine - working as intended"
If you used consultants for the implementation, how is a botched rollout the ERP vendors fault?
This article says …… The council initially customized Oracle but now plans to reimplement the software out-of-the-box, adopting standardized processes..….
The above tells you the issue isn’t from Oracle the ERP vendor.
Literally every ERP sales process includes an "oh you can customize the edge cases to your needs!", but rarely is that a good idea.
This isn’t what you think.
First, large ERP vendors will repeat the mantra that you shouldn’t customize and that they don’t advise it. At best, implementation consultants will be the one talking about customizing.
Secondly, ERP sales process isn’t as simple as you think. Buying firm have a detailed and documented list of requirements and these are checked off as they’re being demoed. If customization is needed, that specific customization needs to be shown before that item requirement is checked off.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366572935/Birmingham-Cit...
By 2018, Birmingham decided to review its future requirements of finance, procurement, human resources and payroll systems. It hired Socitm Advisory as part of the process to help it procure a new cloud-based ERP system.
The contract was awarded to Insight Direct (UK) Ltd, in partnership with Evosys, on the basis that the pair would deliver what Birmingham City Council’s Report to Cabinet in 2021 described as “a new solution” based on the Oracle Cloud ERP.
How much resources do you reckon would it entail to arrive at such spec?
The thing is, you can't agile this. ERP is notoriously hard to deploy. You have warehousing in ERP, but purchasing in paper? Accounting will love you.
With all due respect, technical software people usually fail miserably at understanding what deploying ERP is. It's by no means software project. The "ERP" could be a huge physical book with all required templates even if very inefficient one, nevertheless deploying such "ERP" would still face *exactly* the same problems.
Deploying ERP is first and foremost business transformation. All ERP deployment horror stories that I have some inside info on always revolve around reluctance of business to transform and instead attempting to contort ERP to fit some undefined shape. Deploying ERP painfully highlights all the spots where business processes are undefined, overlapping or flat out useless. Those processes need to be cleaned up, there's no way around that.
Every information system follows SiSo/GiGo (Garbage in - Garbage out) principle. Humans can apply common sense heuristics and do reasonable things given garbage data. Information systems cannot. That's the beauty and horror of deploying an ERP. If management is actually willing, it's a perfect opportunity to streamline business processes, but if it is managed as some software deployment over existing business - you get horror stories, reduced efficiency and maintenance hell on top.
This, a million times.
Never try to bend an ERP - they are immense business process templates internally connected in incomprehensible ways. Bend the company instead, drop whatever process cannot be implemented trivially in the system and adopt one that is.
Just mapping the parts that need to be transformed is a huge process.
Yes, there are times when processes/procedures are truly unique to a firm but it usually isn’t and the firm can ‘standardize’ their process so that it fits into the ERP flow.
These ERPs are usually shipped to handle common/different scenarios/usecases and clients simply have to configure them accordingly (configuration is totally different from trying to customize)