Army's Huge SAP Project 'At High Risk' 166
itwbennett writes "The Army's $2.4 billion SAP project is delayed, over budget, and, once implemented may not even meet its original objectives, according to a recent auditors' report. For its part, the Army is less concerned with the auditors' findings about the project that will manage a $140 billion annual budget and serve nearly 80,000 users once it is complete: 'The Army believes the risks identified in this report are manageable and do not materially impact the [project's] cost and schedule,' said an official with the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology)."
That's what you get (Score:5, Insightful)
When you go with SAP.
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Horseshit. That's what you get when you don't clearly define what you want, when you change requirements all the time, and when you delude yourself into thinking that SAP will work for you "out of the box."
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And when it's more important for you to set up your big contractor job after retirement than to watch out for the public's money. I've seen that time and again where officers get seduced by contractors for a big 6 figure post retirement check.
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Seriously, when someone writes a summary, please don't use unexplained acronyms. You know we don't RTFA.
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EXACTLY!
I was in the ARMY for six years and I know how it works. I have worked with (not for) SAP for six years. If you KNOW what your REAL requirements are and you define them well, implementation does not have to be hell. Unfortunately, people don't usually understand the difference between actual REQUIREMENTS and their old processes. Almost without fail the business will declare their old processes as their requirements... and try to force SAP to function almost exactly the way their old system did... wh
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I've seen this with a system in which it was decided to mirror the paper forms in structure, which also meant keeping the duplication of the paper forms. Complex algorithms were needed to find the latest version of things like addresses. It would be like asking Henry Ford to make his cars shit like a horse and gallop away twice a month when a
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Agreed. Very often the "requirement" is written about how they do it, rather than what the end result should be - which you can get by a different way.
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Can you give me a typical success story for a large, complex, diverse, IP driven enterprise?
100% correct (Score:2)
Re:That's what you get (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, the thing with a SAP rollout (or anything else of this magnitude) is that you pass the point of no return quite early into the project and then the consultants have you exactly where they want you - you can't go back now to your old system, but the new system doesn't really do what you expected it to either so as expensive as it seems, it's cheaper to keep paying more to fix the new system than it would be to migrate everything back to the old system...
Once it's all in place and working as it should, SAP can be a fantastic thing to have but getting there is _never_ as straightforward as one would be lead to believe initially.
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> Exactly, the thing with a SAP rollout (or anything else of this
> magnitude) is that you pass the point of no return quite early
> into the project and then the consultants have you exactly
> where they want you
Here's a thought: consultants are there to do just that: train, guide, and consult (e.g. _assist_ with analyzing). The people doing the implementation should be the organization's managers (not "project managers" - managers) and the employees who will be using the system. Once a projec
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I dunno - after my first 10 ERP implementations I sort of lost track of which system I worked on for which project/employer. Clearly you know far more than I.
sPh
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Since you're a member of the 4-digit ID club, then you may just be old and gray enough to have survived more than 10 of them. Are you functional or technical?
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Given that it took them
Re:That's what you get (Score:5, Insightful)
Story I heard second hand where jeff is a friend of a family member:
There was once a small startup where the founders noticed that most of the software for handling a particular task was needlessly complex and stupidly hard to use.
So they created their own version which was apparently good and very easy to use. the few customers they did pull in were very happy with it but they couldn't seem to break into the big leagues.
They discovered that some such attempts to sell their software to big corps had been shot down by the local consultants.
They tried contacting the big consulting firms to try to find out what they considered to be wrong with their software so that they could fix whatever problem was putting off the consultants but got back useless boilerplate replies just stating that they didn't think it was suitable.
Then one night in the bar at an exhibition one of the founders (lets call him jeff) got chatting candidly to someone from one of the big consulting firms(lets call him carl).
So jeff asked carl if he'd seen their software and what he thought of it.
carl said that it was quite excellent.
jeff asked why then did carls firm recommend against their clients using it.
Carls reply was that it was simply too easy to use and too easy to set up.
If Carls company recommended a worse piece of software that was hellish to set up then they were guaranteed many many billable hours as the client would be almost guaranteed to need consulting services.
So jeff went home and his startup set to work adding a myriad of essentially useless options and made the software vastly harder to configure.
it was still the same software once it was running but now the manual was a tome rather than a pamphlet and the setup took an expert rather than an amateur.
Like magic sales went up as consultants were suddenly willing to recommend it to their clients.
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You appear to have mistyped "totally made up".
I'll be charitable and assume it's true that such a system exists and does all you say it can.
All it would take is one small, hungry consultancy - even a bunch of mates - to start pushing it and they could undercut their competitors by a huge margin, while still coining it in.
Prove you're not a liar, on this one at least: provide a citation. Name of company and system. Real names for jeff[sic] and carl[sic].
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consultant?
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I'm confused why you're modded funny rather than informative.
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This should be modded insightful.
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There is a saying, I keep hearing: "No-one ever got fired for choosing SAP"....
Not a developer and certainly not a SAP consultant. But I did live through implementation of SAP at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. For all practical purposes, the CEO bet the company by committing us to implementing SAP. The project cost was something like $3e8 in a company with sales of about $3e9. You spend that kind of cash, you bloody well better recover it in improved profitability.
Politically, with those kinds of stakes, the project is going to succeed. If it isn't a success, reality will
Not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
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ah, my kingdom for mod points.. As to the earlier post that requirements weren't locked down, and changing needs lead to this. I doubt that there has EVER been a SAP project that didn't have significant scope creep and redefinition midpoint. Also, two or three different phases with different consultants (early, mid, and closer) to get to a mostly functional system.
Ah, the joys of enterprise software.
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If the scope of a project is big enough, it is actually impossible to nail the requirements because they will never get consistent. This is also the reason that there is a direct correlation between the size of the project and the successrate. To my knowledge, no single IT-projects over 100 million dollars has *ever* been completed within a reasonable amount of time and in range of the budget, with most of the desired features intact.
Ofcourse, even with a gazillion users there's no need to have a really com
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That makes sense for everything. But when the consultants don't know the product, the client doesn't know the product, and the sales rep doesn't know the product, it's impossible to know what the requirements should be. Mix in the fact that the consultants need projects to move forward because they need the money, and sales people need projects to grow because they need the money, and the client needs projects to move forward because their current state of operations is overwhelming and obviously ineffici
Another money sink... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why that isn't cancelled, but Webbs telescope is? Ah, its thats the Army....
RIP US space program
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http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
I just visited NASA Goddard (great visitor's center, take the kids) and according to the web site they're working toward a 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. Quite impressive if you can also wrangle a lab tour.
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Too bad we spend so much money on wars that don't make us any safer that we can't afford science. I am so utterly disappointed in Obama...I didn't fall for any of that "change the world" stuff, but I honestly thought he would be better than this. I can't remember who said it, but this isn't my quote, 'As a President, Barack Obama makes a great Senator'.
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To be fair Obama asked for a raise in their budget and Congress cut it and asked for a small cut in the military budget and Congress upped it.
President don't have as much control as the talking heads may imply. On the other hand I'm sure he could have done more. Just thought it was a good thing to know, though
Government IT projects (Score:2, Interesting)
What is it about government IT projects that makes them go so disastrously wrong? The UK government are no better at getting it right. The MOD* procurement system was a similar mess - over budget, and didn't do what it was set out to do.
* Ministry of Defense
Re:Government IT projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Because:
a) They always employ people with the right connections instead of the right competence
b) Because the consultants they hire know the real money comes from doing it wrong? Why make an effort to deliver on schedule and under budget when you can take your time over it and earn twice as much money in the process?
You might think I'm joking but I've sat in some of the meetings. When I arrived I was under the delusion that I was there to do some work but I was completely wrong, we were only there to kill time before going off to a nice little French restaurant somebody had discovered. My bad.
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the real money comes from doing it wrong
The longer I stay in the software industry the more this fact depresses me.
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the real money comes from doing it wrong
The longer I stay in the software industry the more this fact depresses me.
If I were a little better at programming and were a LOT less honest I could get stinking rich writing enterprise software.
I take that back, my programming skills, though weak, are better than a lot of the enterprise software developers I've encountered.
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Say you are a builder. If you make a good building for a client they will come back to you for the next one. Software is different. They will install the next one from your distribution, unless you foresaw this problem and broke the software so this couldn't happen.
Re:Government IT projects (Score:5, Informative)
c) They still believe in Waterfall development methodology. They also believe in "fixed-price" contracts. It's the change requests that kill you. The consultants gladly build what you asked for. Then when you realize that you really didn't know what you wanted, they have you.
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Oh man. You nailed that dead center. Too bad you posted anon 'cause that was a plus 5 informative if ever I saw one.
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Gosh, that's going to be the most insightful comment. The only thing I can do is ammend it a bit.
Currently, as least in Europe, every high priced contract needs to be tendered in the open. This however means that you need to know beforehand what you want. So basically they bring in the consultants at an early stage to create the business case. Then they tender the thing (after a Q&A of the possible participants). And of course price will be a big decider for who wins the tender, so each and every partic
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The Waterfall model works very very well in *cultures* where it fits. In Japan for example time and time again they have used the Waterfall model successfully. Americans with a government contract? Yeah, they don't culturally fit the model and, as it's been pointed out, a government contract will make you money for as long as you can extend it in America.
There's nothing wrong with the Waterfall model - but perhaps the American government should learn no American company bidding for a contract with a Waterfa
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Waterfall works if you have:
- a very clear definition of the problem, hence, the problem shouldn't be too big (think a Wordpad sized project)
- a very thorough knowledge of the technology and its limitations (project that works in several web browsers? forget it)
- almost no variation in deployment and use conditions
Not many projects fall under those categories
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> - a very clear definition of the problem, hence, the problem shouldn't be
> too big (think a Wordpad sized project)
> - a very thorough knowledge of the technology and its limitations (project
> that works in several web browsers? forget it)
> - almost no variation in deployment and use conditions
>
> Not many projects fall under those categories
And more generally: that is knowledge and wisdom that is typically only obtained by /doing the project/ - hands-on.
sPh
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I've worked on a lot of projects here in Japan and I can tell you with absolute confidence you are wrong. Most console games are developed under a Waterfall model for example. A lot of embedded software as well. The Waterfall model works if you have developers who actually implement according to the designs and do it well. The Waterfall works in getting products to market. I'm convinced this has a big part to do with social and developer culture in Japan.
Perhaps another factor is how the Waterfall model is
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I've worked on a lot of projects here in Japan and I can tell you with absolute confidence you are wrong. Most console games are developed under a Waterfall model for example. A lot of embedded software as well. The Waterfall model works if you have developers who actually implement according to the designs and do it well.
Except you just proved me right.
Games: 20% code, 80% art. And that's true even for the first Super Mario games. And game engines are reused often.
Fixed platform (same thing for embedded sw). Working in a restricted platform is much easier in some aspects than, for example, a desktop program.
Reading the Mythical Man Month may explain it better.
The Waterfall works in getting products to market. I'm convinced this has a big part to do with social and developer culture in Japan.
Perhaps another factor is how the Waterfall model is implemented here. We have planners for example - they do all the planning and they deal with inconsistencies that arise during implementation. Planner work -under- designers, but planners work -for- programmers. Furthermore, the Waterfall model is just used for the core application - peripheral features and post-release enhancements [kakuchou - kaizen] are rarely handled using the Waterfall model. In addition the implementation step is usually broken up between departments with a set of joining critical-passes - basically becoming a separate process in and of itself.
That's very interesting. Yes, for core features Waterfall works better.
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There's nothing wrong with the Waterfall model
Yes, there is. Go read up on Design of Design by Fred Brooks (known for the mythical man month and no silver bullet).
The problem with the waterfall model is that it does not allow for learning. With many IT projects, both the client and also the developers need to learn about the problem space and each other.
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There have been succesfull projects with waterfall methods. There have been a lot of succesfull projects with fixed price contracts: for the last 15 years I've never done business on any other basis (both as buyer and as supplier) - if you know what you are doing it's not a problem at all.
Even competence of the people involved isn't an issue. In a project that big, there's bound to be a lot of nitwits but the competent people can usually work around them.
No, what kills this thing is that even with the Gods
Re:Government IT projects (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I'm a consultant working primarily for government, and I can honestly say that those aren't the reasons why these projects fail.
Corruption in hiring is surprisingly rare in western countries, and usually involves only a small subset of the people on a large project. I've heard it's a serious problem in developing countries, but I've only seen it a few times here, and and I've only ever seen it lead to a project failure when the project team was only a handful of people.
You'd be surprised about the work ethic of consultants.
For some consulting organizations, there's so much work that they prefer to have their consultants finish projects quickly so that they can go on to other projects and hence satisfy all of their customers, not just some of them. Not turning up at all is a surefire way of losing a customer to your competition, which can go from nonexistent to serious in very little time if they suddenly start landing big projects.
More commonly, consulting is only a part of what a company does. Large vendors like SAP sell licenses, support contracts, and consulting separately. If one branch of the company starts annoying the customers (too expensive, slow, incompetent, etc...) then this drags down the results of other branches too, and then their executives become very angry and complain directly to the CEO. God help the consultant working for an organization that makes most of their profit from licenses if the fuck up a sales deal!
Lastly, consulting firms tend to hire better-than-average people, and those tend to be high achievers and motivated professionals. Delivering projects on time and on budget looks good on a CV, and can lead to even more lucrative positions.
I've seen enough projects that I've figured out that government contracts go over budget or time for several inter-related reasons:
- Ridiculous levels of risk aversion -- if there's no bonus or profit to be had, then no risk is worth it. This leads to some very stupid decisions, over-engineering, etc...
- Management overhead -- big bureaucracies ignore the cost of management overhead, because the only way to reduce it is to fire a bunch of managers, but management makes hiring and firing decisions! Almost nobody would ever fire themselves. Instead, managers rationalize the need for management. There's no arguing with people about useless processes, when the existence of that process, useful or not, keeps them employed.
- Conservative approach to IT -- a big project is hard enough, but when you also have to deal with decades old software and sometimes even hardware, the difficulty becomes astronomical. In quite recent times, I've come across all sorts of fun things in the core infrastructure of large organizations. For example, OS/2 is still in use. Novell NetWare refuses to die. I've seen Windows 95 as a server in a data center just recently. I did a lot of work on an enterprise DOS application just a couple of years ago. It's not just systems, but processes to. Why change anything, just because the software is completely different, and the hardware is six orders of magnitude bigger or faster?
So imagine being the consultant hired to rip up and replace 10s of millions of lines of code across hundreds of undocumented systems, most of which should have been cleansed with purifying fire decades ago, but you're not allowed to. Instead, you have to sit patiently through a never ending series of pointless meetings that serve only to prevent any bureaucrat from ever having to make a decision, or take any blame for anything.
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Lastly, consulting firms tend to hire better-than-average people, and those tend to be high achievers and motivated professionals. Delivering projects on time and on budget looks good on a CV, and can lead to even more lucrative positions.
Yeah.... No.... Do you happen to work for IBM or Accenture? Because they definitely don't hire 100% of high achievers and they definitely don't tend to. Although IBM is the best "supplier" of freelance SAP consultants on the market(EU) at the moment.
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I do similar work and I'd like to add that sometimes projects are, by nature of the customer itself, impossible to accomplish successfully. Requirements may be impossible to pin down or shift randomly. Resources necessary to finish the project are unavailable. Key users may be hostile to the project and unwilling to use a system that they feel (right or wrong) is a political hammer against them.
What I have NEVER seen is a consultant or system integrator willing to tell the client blunty that they have cr
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a) They always employ people with the right connections instead of the right competence
And even when they do, they believe that certificates and training takes precedence to experience. In short people in government are taught to be ignorant of experience, but guess who's teaching them that? Yep, the genera populace’s distrust of people breeds such ignorance. In all fairness, the state employees are not dumb they just have to make sure that they follow the rules and generally know that experience is worth much more than the paper.
It's not gov't, it's SAP (Score:5, Insightful)
It fails just as often in the private sector, the difference being that there, the client usually goes bankrupt before you hear about it.
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Indeed. Worked one of SBCs failed one-bill attempts. I have no idea what the total loss was but they lost $2B buying and later selling consulting firms who were pretty much dedicated to doing that piece of work.
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It happens with other corporate crap, like ClearCase.
If ClearCrap wasn't crap google would use it, simple as that.
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You're 100% right.
Talking about 'enterprise helpdesk systems', I had the displeasure of using one that made Clearcase look like the best sw in the world.
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Because it's not their money, and they're not spending it upon themselves.
Milton Friedman identified 4 types of spending:
Re:Government IT projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it does. You just don't get to hear about it either because it's confidential or because private sector waste isn't a good story.
I have worked on many projects in the private sector and heard about plenty more where the IT director has believed what a salesman told them and ended up with an absolute disaster. What you say might be true for SMBs but big organisations are not too different to the public sector.
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For suitably small values of "work", and at a cost of a never ending death-march of fixes, workarounds and bodges.
Been there and seen it. I haven't actually done it, but I've cleared up the mess (or at least tried to) after other people have.
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You really have no idea do you? Plenty of private sector projects fail too after many years of incompetence and it may shock you to know but governments hold companies to contracts, have clauses about non-delivery, incentives for early completion that sort of thing. Come back when you've actually worked somewhere large rather than talking utter bollocks.
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Government agencies do IT projects because it saves the people their time. So that the average government employee can play some games or read news. In the enlightened world, it's not the IT department that orders a system to be upgraded or created, it's the actual department that needs it. IT departments is usually the one that oversees the
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"Spending other people's money on someone else (most government spending)."
Well, just exactly like corporations. You don't think a general manager or a CEO is expending *his* money, do you? He is expending *your* money via your retirement funds that go to the stock market.
"Because it's not their money, and they're not spending it upon themselves."
Yes, quite exactly like corporations. No wonder their success rate for big projects is more or less that of the government.
"I've done work on government project
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I've worked for both the UK government and the private sector and the failure of large IT projects has one thing in common. Shite external contractors who promise the earth without knowing the first thing about what's actually required. It would be far better to have people who know the area doing the work, but for some reason senior managers all seem to believe their staff are less competent than any of the external companies who all have a well-documented record of uselessness. Private Eye [private-eye.co.uk] should be re
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Right on, great book. These people essentially have unlimited funds, thanks to the taxpayers. Why bother getting it right when you can just take more and more money anyway?
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Huge projects usually fail because they are deadline-oriented. From there everything goes down the drain because every bump on the road will cause the project managers to either :
1) compromise on the quality of the implementation, which leads to resistance from the people in charge of maintenance because they feel that problems are offloaded to their department. This actually initiates a downward spiral in quality and collaboration areas.
2) compromise on the number of features that are delivered, which lead
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Because the system is grossly corrupt...
There are only a very small number of very large and highly bureaucratic consultancies who ever get picked to manage these projects, and they tend to have very little in the way of technical skills and a corporate culture that scares such people away.
They massively over charge, deliver extremely poor quality work safe in the knowledge that there are very few competitors all of which are equally incompetent so there's no danger of losing out.
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Because this math "a $140 billion annual budget and serve nearly 80,000 users" makes sense to the government.
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"What is it about government IT projects that makes them go so disastrously wrong?"
Who said it's only the government?
Want to know one of the most (in)famous SAP fiasco back in the day? The one from the company that wanted to put itself as *the* reference consultancy for big SAP projects on its own implementation. The verily non-government HP.
Another SAP disaster (Score:3)
Take that number in. $40M. Ridiculously overpriced even if it did work, but this doesn't even do that. Payroll isn't rocket science. A few competent programmers locked away for 6 months could do better. Far too much money is thrown at so-called 'enterprise software'.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/218348,ibm-under-fire-for-qld-health-bungle.aspx [itnews.com.au]
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/351650/ibm_says_queensland_health_sap_failure_its_fault/ [arnnet.com.au]
http://www.zdnet.com.au/qld-health-sap-woes-lead-to-cash-advances-339302381.htm [zdnet.com.au]
http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2010/05/07/215335_gold-coast-news.html [goldcoast.com.au]
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/qld-health-pays-hefty-price-for-sick-payroll-system/story-e6frgakx-1225813063057 [theaustralian.com.au]
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/351608/updated_qld_govt_blames_ibm_health_payroll_bungle/ [computerworld.com.au]
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What the government should do is sue all the contractors. Return the software and ask for damages. Lawyers are good at coming with bullshit numbers.
Sue them for 100x the value they got from the gov.
Probably... (Score:2, Informative)
They probably hired a big, fat consulting company like Accenture to implement SAP for them, who's in it to get even fatter by putting as many unqualified warm bodies on a contract as possible, rather than hiring a someone who will actually run it like a project and get out... someone who is actually concerned about the customer's best interests. One would hope that the Army would know better.
SAP is a huge piece of shit (Score:3, Funny)
1. It's written in fucking COBOL
2. It's the vilest user interface I've ever seen. I have no idea how anyone could come up with something that bad.
3. C. O. B. O. L.
C and ABAP (Score:3, Informative)
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ABAP is sufficiently similar to COBOL that I think it'd be fair to call it a relative in the same language family.
And if you think the SAP user interface is bad, may I introduce you to BAAN or Daly & Wolcott, both of which make SAP look like god's own gift to UIs?
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All? Really? Either somebody had installed it incorrectly or this is a corporate legend. Or someone had set his logon defaults wrong.
It's a bit clunky, but I think incredibly unintuitive is going a bit far. Would you rather type in a command line? Do you think end users w
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Gasp it's written in something that has a proven track record of working and being scalable. For fuck's sake rewrite it in Ruby on Rails immediately!
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My experience with SAP is that some of my classes tried to introduce us to it from a user/manager perspective, so I don't know about the technical backend, but I agree about the epically shitty UI.
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There actually is a French competitor. After twenty years of development and a lot of cigarettes, wine and coffee they've made a lot of progress - they've got the shortlist for the name down to "Camus", "Descartes" and "Nefaitrien".
SAP is worse than anything M$ (Score:2, Funny)
My company recently switched to SAP... it more than doubled the time it takes us to do anything. that software is garbage, yet people keep buying into it. they have great salespeople.
Now the US army is switching to it? The military will shut down. We joke that the Germans (it is german software) are getting the world back for beating them in WWII.
You can't understand how bad this software is until you actually see it.
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MS stuff is like swimming in a pool of golden unicorn tears compared to most "enterprise software". The reason is quite simple: a lot of small companies use MS stuff, and if it was as hideous as most "enterprise" software, people wouldn't buy it or upgrade.
In enterprises, the purchasing decisions are made by people who don't use it day-in-day-out. They look at things like the reporting module, see that's great and buy it. I worked in an organisation that dumped a working in-house change control system for a
Editors, there's no need to repeat yourselves (Score:2, Insightful)
"The Army's $2.4 billion SAP project is delayed, over budget, and, once implemented may not even meet its original objectives"
Surely "The Army's $2.4 billion SAP project is a SAP project" would have been sufficient, guys. ;)
Haha (Score:3)
(mod me +5 insightful, I used SAP for years and promise that I deserve it based on the short but very insightful comment/review above)
No surprise.. (Score:2)
Has there ever been an implementation of SAP that didn't go massively budget and fail to meet its initial goals?
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My company runs SAP as its ERP system, and the project was only a little late -- but on budget and met its initial goals. We were migrating from Daly & Wolcott on an AS/400. Then again, we only have about 260 employees, and we did a fair amount of the work using our own people. We didn't just foist the whole thing off on consultants, as is most often the way.
As someone who writes integration code with ERP systems, I can say that for all the problems SAP has, it's not nearly as terrible as others. I've w
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And AMEN to comparing SAP to other ERP systems. SAP is somewhat good...
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Yes, that's part of the idea - to try and whip a company into shape w/r/t best practices.
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Too verbose... (Score:2)
The Army's $2.4 billion SAP project is delayed, over budget, and, once implemented may not even meet its original objectives, according to a recent auditors' report.
You could have just said, "The Army is engaged in deploying SAP."
The rest can be inferred by anyone familiar with an SAP roll-out.
why am I not surprised? (Score:2)
SAP implementation is a mess even in the civilian world - and then throw military procurement bureaucratic issues into the mix?
Great product? (Score:5, Funny)
- The user interface is the worst of any software product I've ever used, and I'm not exaggerating.
- The user documentation is even worse
- I'm told the developer documentation is worser still, esp. if you don't speak German.
- COBOL is so fucking awesome.
- It costs a leg, an arm, your first born and your left nuts. Oh and your soul.
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- I've seen worse UI's but only in free software. Never in something paid for.
- User documentation sucks
- Database field names are a joke (5 positions? come ON!)
- If the metadata in SAP doesn't match the actual use of the field, too bad.
- Modules are by and large crap, except for the ones like FiCo that have been developed over decades.
I've just had the misfortune of working on the SLcM module, which is the bastard child of the HR module, which itself is a demon-spawned object oriented abomination, created
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But have you ever actually seen a business successfully happy with what resulted from getting in with SAP?
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Or a big bank, or a big insurance company, or a big oil company.
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Well, at least in the insurance industry it looks like they're all wising up and getting off of SAP/Accenture these days.
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It's a word, but not in English. It's Greek for "sit on your arses all day and hope Germany pays your bills".
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There's this thing out there called "business", which tends to use software to assist with running its day-to-day activities. You might want to Google a bit along those lines - I hear these "business" thingies might hire some people from time to time.
sPh
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SAP develops and sells various forms of business process management software (which generally includes subsystems such as financials {General Ledger, A/P, A/R, etc}, customer order processing, manufacturing management, purchasing, warehouse management, shipping, receiving, payroll, etc), often known as ERP (originally Enterprise Resource Planning). SAP AG generally trades places from year to year with IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle as the world's largest software supplier.
sPh
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Or you could go here:
http://www.sap.com/solutions/business-suite/erp/index.epx [sap.com]
sPh
By the way, my posts in no way constitute an endorsement or anti-endorsement of SAP; purely informational ;-)