Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 97 posts

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#71

Post by nradov »

drumhead wrote: post #68

If it's not a fail with Oracle, it's SAP or dynamics or some other "ERP". Do these implementations ever work, and why do these big organisations keep going for them?surely they've seen the string of failures preceding them? I suspect it's ego, and the need to pad CVs that does it. And the unwillingness of the people who should know better to say no.

Most implementations do "work" to the extent that they are better than nothing. I mean what's the alternative? Running business processes on paper is no longer a practical option. And most enterprises lack the scale and competence that would be needed to build their own custom ERP in a cost effective way.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#72

Post by trailynx »

pelorat wrote: post #39
KptMarchewa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.

No one living here considers Turkey to be part of Europe

I need to disagree. As a (central) European person I very much consider at least Istanbul to be an European city - not sure about the whole of Turkey, though. After some thoughts why I feel this way I think it boils down to geography and history. Istanbul is geographically on both sides of the bosphorus strait, where the “continents” Europe and Asia are considered divided. And then it has historical significance for Europe (as Constantinople), being one of the major stable forces in Europe during at least the middle ages (but also before and after).

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#73

Post by user568439 »

drumhead wrote: post #68

If it's not a fail with Oracle, it's SAP or dynamics or some other "ERP". Do these implementations ever work, and why do these big organisations keep going for them?surely they've seen the string of failures preceding them? I suspect it's ego, and the need to pad CVs that does it. And the unwillingness of the people who should know better to say no.

Yes, they do work and sometimes pretty good. It mostly depends on the implementation team. SAP which is the one I know, has plenty of defects but also a lot of virtues. A good implementation and customizing team can make it run properly.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#74

Post by generic92034 »

orwin wrote: post #57
generic92034 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leaving Sap was a good idea From the article: "Standard SAP is the same, but BCC customized SAP to get it working really well and apart from some minor annoyances, SAP was a good product that should never have been ditched," the insider said.

I've worked with SAP in two companies: for the end user, it's slow, ugly, hard to use, and full of idiosyncrasy. I've used two open source ERP, both as end users and as maintainer (granted, in smaller companies). Both were objectively better. Props to ERP5 and the composition it allows by the way, especially for the web pages that are easy to modify without prior knowledge (controllers and the database especially are…

I do not want to belittle your personal experience, but two companies make no convincing picture, IMHO. I am working daily as a developer with ERP systems. Once you get used to the idiosyncrasy they are usually no longer slow or hard to use (unless the implementation partner has really messed up - which happens).

Open source ERP can neither cover the functional range of main ERP systems like Oracle's or SAP's, nor can you expect the same level of domain knowledge being applied to it in development (with a small fraction of the developers the large ones have, lacking the specialization at the large vendors), nor do at least I know of success stories in that regard with Fortune 500 companies, as their main, driving ERP system.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#75

Post by candiodari »

nradov wrote: post #53
candiodari wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Oracle ERP licences start at 100k per year for small-to-medium companies, NOT including hardware or let's say 2 years of consultancy to get it installed in the first place. Big enterprises pay a lot more and will have to maintain all sorts of operations folks anyway, so I'm pretty sure you could have a team of, say, 5 SWEs for less than and ERP system. Especially for less than Oracle. Also there are at thi…

Come on. Paying SWE salaries is only a tiny fraction of the cost of building, implementing, and maintaining a custom ERP application. The complete lifecycle costs are enormous even if you use an open source product as a starting point.

And yet ... every ERP installation I've EVER seen is a custom ERP application, with maybe a standard "big" database at the center (not in the case of Odoo, or MS Dynamics that use standard non-ERP databases, or at least databases that don't usually work in ERP systems, so ERP without a big database in the middle exists). These were developed by teams of consultants and maintained by multiple teams of sysadmins, SWEs, DB admins, ...

The supposed extra features are usually 20-year-old disasters. For example, one thing they all have and are very proud of is a standard UI system. That means the "same form" works on Windows, on the web, on phones (these days), with a centralized auth provider, ...

Except to say that ABAP GUI sucks is like saying first hammering a spike into your own skull and then having it pulled back out by a bull is a suboptimal experience. The question that joke screams "why would you do it like that" is one you'll be asking a lot when using these ERP systems. In case there's any doubt: their UI most definitely does not really work on mobile without extensive changes ... also known as "development". And yes it's been improved and is better. Which is to say at one point I believe Oracle had a "mobile UI" which was an android "RDP client" (sending screens pixel by pixel) connecting to a windows server which ran the windows binary of their UI. Even required per-user windows licences. I don't know how they did it, but it actually had windows 3.1 style scrollbars on the phone display. These are improvements in the sense that HIV is a big experience improvement over gonnorhea.

And you might think "surely that means the form is going to be very responsive !".

Heh.

These installations require DB admins, require SWEs, require managers, oncall, ..., require colocation/dedicated/cloud costs (may God help you if you're paying cloud prices for your DB, and whilst I agree admin is easier it's not so much easier that you don't need a DB team). Oh and I've never seen a SAP ABAP installation go 6 months without a consultant getting hired to solve some issue the company couldn't solve.

Just about the only really unique thing about ERP software is that the code for the "applications" lives in the database itself (MS access, or Dbase used to do that too). This is also just about the worst thing about them, as it means you don't get integration testing, or standard version control, or files, or ...

Yes, I know, somehow Oracle has convinced every MBA to do this rather than pay 5 SWEs to just make them PHP apps. And no, I don't mean those PHP apps will be worse, they'll be way better. It's standard so you can get consultants to attempt to fix the worst disasters.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#76

Post by unity1001 »

pelorat wrote: post #39
KptMarchewa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how they are "biggest local authority by population in Europe". Surely Istanbul is larger.

No one living here considers Turkey to be part of Europe

Yeah, they dont. Contradictorily so, since the part of the Turkey that is geographically in Europe is larger than many European states both in respect to surface area and also in respect to population.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#77

Post by taylodl »

Overpromise, underdeliver, and overcharge. It's the Oracle Way.

In my experience, Oracle only ever built one product that was good, and you can replace it with PostgreSQL for significantly less money and gain greater flexibility to boot.

I think the source of Oracle's execution woes lies in part with their Fusion Middleware. It's garbage. Even though JEE has become somewhat outdated, it's still viable. That isn't the issue. The problem is the horrible memory management, continually stuck threads, and their poor messaging implementation. It makes solutions built on the platform prone to constant failure and requiring lots and lots of hardware - which of course increases licensing costs back to Oracle.

I've given up trying to figure out why people keep buying their stuff.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#78

Post by red-iron-pine »

> Oracle ERP project disaster

Redundant headline. Oracle & ERP almost always implies disaster.

Seriously, never again. Ditto for IBM, and a lesser extent, SAP. I wish Red Hat had a real competitor, cuz Canonical ain't there yet.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#79

Post by red-iron-pine »

908B64B197 wrote: post #52
pjc50 wrote: post #27

This 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.c…

> This 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. Honestly, it's not that surprising. Government salaries aren't competitive with the private sector, and especially not with FAANG. Same government workers are now tasked with identifying requirements and managing consultants. But are they even qualified to do that?

> Same government workers are now tasked with identifying requirements and managing consultants

I've been in the private sector for the last 10 years and most of the folks I worked with sure aren't.

Re: Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

#80

Post by rhaway84773 »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #79
908B64B197 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This 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. Honestly, it's not that surprising. Government salaries aren't competitive with the private sector, and especially not with FAANG. Same government workers are now tasked with identifying requirements and managing consultants. But are they even qualified to do that?

> Same government workers are now tasked with identifying requirements and managing consultants I've been in the private sector for the last 10 years and most of the folks I worked with sure aren't.

The private sector has the advantage that companies which don’t have competent enough people will simply fail and cease to exist.

Birmingham cannot cease to exist, however, so failures need to be recovered from.

Post reply on HN