What does ERP mean in this context? Asking because it means something else that is making all this discussion of ERP projects and consultants sound quite funny.
Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
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Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
My take is that it boils down to insane requirements from the buyer and yes-men sellers. The technical problem is wanting one end-all goto system instead of like 20 different utilities I guess.
I haven't been on projects of this size, but with many of our customers a big issue is that the decisions are taken by people sufficiently high up in the organization that they don't know what's really going on, and without including key resources from lower levels to provide that insight. In my experience it only takes one or two levels to get to that point. Regarding the insane requirements, it's also my experience…
> Regarding the insane requirements, it's also my experience that a lot of companies think they're snowflakes
At least with anything government, there is another problem: changing processes often requires a lot of work, which means explaining to (completely clueless) politicians why something is necessary, get cost approval for each change, convince majorities... it's easier to have an omnibus "migrate to newest version of XYZ" package and to spend the money on making the system operate according to your whims than to fix the underlying bullshit.
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#23What does ERP mean in this context? Asking because it means something else that is making all this discussion of ERP projects and consultants sound quite funny.
At one point I contributed to "Odoo" (OpenERP). It essentially means having lots of Applications work against a single database so that everything about the whole company uses this single database.
ERP vendors generally have a whole bunch of standard applications ready. Things like inventory, sending out stuff, payroll (for X number of countries), ...
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#24"The UK's biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster". There's really no need to rope in the whole continent for a specific thing in a specific country. The fact that they're the biggest local authority by population in Europe is really not relevant to anything that's happening here.
I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#25What does ERP mean in this context? Asking because it means something else that is making all this discussion of ERP projects and consultants sound quite funny.
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Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#26Leaving Sap was a good idea, but i'm pretty sure replacing Sap by oracle ERP wasn't. Especially, it seems it's one to one in functionalities? The better idea is to take a more modular ERP imho, and slowly transition.
It does sound like a very "out of the frying pan" decision.
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#27This happens a lot. Another way of looking at it is that this is a successful outcome for Oracle, because they've hugely increased their billable hours.
Councils are I think too small to access GDS? If they could I'm sure the superior GDS project management would mitigate this kind of disaster.
I remember when the University of Cambridge had a similar disaster and ultimately published an inquiry: https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2001-02/weekly/5861/1.h...
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#28"The UK's biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster". There's really no need to rope in the whole continent for a specific thing in a specific country. The fact that they're the biggest local authority by population in Europe is really not relevant to anything that's happening here.
I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.
Is Istanbul a single unitary local authority or done by boroughs/arrondisements?
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#29"The UK's biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster". There's really no need to rope in the whole continent for a specific thing in a specific country. The fact that they're the biggest local authority by population in Europe is really not relevant to anything that's happening here.
I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.
Europe is a state of mind.
Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster
#30Leaving Sap was a good idea, but i'm pretty sure replacing Sap by oracle ERP wasn't. Especially, it seems it's one to one in functionalities? The better idea is to take a more modular ERP imho, and slowly transition.
> The better idea is to take a more modular ERP imho, and slowly transition. ...or just imagine what £100M in bounties to open source developers could accomplish. It would probably get their requirements met and, as a side-effect, contribute billions to the world economy by liberating many others from lock-in, besides just Birmingham City Council. As it stands, all they seem to have accomplished with this ludicrous a…
Even just normal competent salaried employees would've been an improvement.
With that amount you could've reasonably employed a 50 person department with roughly 100k cost of employment for 20 years.