ERP Solutions

Reflecting on 2010

While ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning solutions are the core of many companies, there are times when an ERP project doesn’t go well.  As we reflect on ERP projects in the year 2010, we’ll discover that there are still lots of lessons to be learned.  An ERP project can be a gigantic undertaking.  If someone doesn’t pull their weight, there is risk of ruining the entire project.  There has to be an immense amount of coordination between the customer, the vendor, and any third party implementers.  Everyone is under pressure to complete an ERP project on-time, on-budget, and with all the necessary customizations (if needed).  Sometimes the pressure builds to a point where it can’t help but explode.  Unfortunately we witnessed some of these explosions in 2010.

One witnessed unsuccessful ERP project has to do with Oracle and the Fort Worth, Texas police department.  Unfortunately, the Fort Worth police department was having some issues with Oracle’s PeopleSoft payroll solution.  However, upon deeper investigation it was found that the culprit was human error.  The lesson to be learned here is to train your employees!

Next up is the Marin County, California ERP disaster.  It seems as though Marin County was unhappy with their third party vendor (Deloitte) who they hired to work on their SAP ERP solution.  It turned out that the price of a new ERP solution would be millions of dollars less than the price Deloitte was charging to update Marin’s current ERP system.  The lesson to be learned here is that not all third party vendors are created equally.

Another witnessed and most unsuccessful ERP project was with SAP and Waste Management.  Waste Management didn’t feel that SAP’s ERP demo was like the real thing.  They sued SAP for over four hundred million dollars.  The case was settled, however, the terms are confidential.  SAP claimed that Waste Management didn’t completely define their important business processes.  The lesson learned here is to define your business processes and demo the heck out of an ERP product before you commit to buy it.

Our last unsuccessful ERP project has to do with the city of San Diego, California and SAP.  The city had to postpone a budget audit due to a malfunction with SAP’s payroll system.  However, there turned out to be no software malfunction of any kind.  Human error was the cause of this fiasco.  The lesson here is to train your employees!

Written by :

kristine H