ERP Software

Enterprise Software Companies are Human Too! – Part two

As we continue to discuss some infamous blunders made over the past few years by Enterprise Software Companies, it’s important to point out that the blame should not always be put on the Enterprise Software Company.  In fact, many times the blunder occurs because the customer was unprepared or the third party implementation vendors did a poor job.  The next blunder we discuss has nothing to do with the Enterprise Software Company or the customer because the blame lies with the third party vendor.  This blunder has to do with SAP and the City of Portland.  The City of Portland budgeted thirty one million dollars for an SAP implementation.  The solution was a year late to implement and the price went up to fifty million dollars.  However, the City of Portland didn’t blame SAP entirely for this one.  The City of Portland fired their systems integrator and began working with SAP directly.  It seems to me that the City of Portland didn’t choose a good third party implementer.  The lesson here is to do your research when selecting a consulting firm to assist with an Enterprise Resource Planning implementation.  Another case that’s related to third party implementer, Deloitte, has to do with an SAP implementation for Marin County located in California.  Marin Country decided to sue Deloitte because they feel the third party implementer misrepresented their SAP skills and experience.  The last SAP related blunder for this article has to do with SAP, Axon and the City of San Diego.  The City of San Diego ended an implementation control with third party implementer Axon.  Not only was the SAP project running eleven million dollars over budget, but the City of San Diego didn’t feel that Axon played nice.  Once again, it’s important to hire the right third party implementation vendor.  Now we are going to leave SAP alone for a while and move on to some other Enterprise Resource Planning blunders made by some other popular Enterprise Resource Planning vendors. A notable blunder that happened in 2008 was between Oracle and Overstock.com.  It seems like Overstock.com looked over some important fixes during their system upgrade, which resulted in some accounting issues.  Remember that you know your company best, so get involved in the upgrade or implementation to make sure nothing is overlooked. 

Written by :

kristine H