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

theregister.com

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

#51

Post by toyg »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #19
kodah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is to build purpose built software, but that would require this municipality to pay SWEs (among other folks) directly. An interesting case study would be if it were actually cheaper in the end to just employ some software engineers and write something catered to themselves.

Yeah, I don't think it would be any cheaper, or any likely to meet success. Succesful software development is hard, whether you hire a consultancy or are a non-software company trying to create an in-house department. Software around workflow (an ERP) is one of the most challenging areas. Because it is hard to shoe-horn it into a universal pattern, or figure out what a given organization actually needs (not always wh…

> To do it in-house succesfully requires a level of healthy functioning [...] that few organizations have

I think it actually requires the organization to morph into being a tech company first. In order to have good software to run a City Council, it effectively requires the Council to become "a software-making organization that delivers council services". In order to have good software to run a bank, it requires the bank to become "a software-making organization that delivers banking services".

Unfortunately, it's both politically difficult (nobody goes into any type of non-IT activity because they want to work with software) and really challenging: not even IT organizations have figured out the best way to address problems like technical debt, language churn, documentation etc, and non-IT organizations face them just as much.

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

#52

Post by 908B64B197 »

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?

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

#53

Post by nradov »

candiodari wrote: post #33
jrochkind1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think it would be any cheaper, or any likely to meet success. Succesful software development is hard, whether you hire a consultancy or are a non-software company trying to create an in-house department. Software around workflow (an ERP) is one of the most challenging areas. Because it is hard to shoe-horn it into a universal pattern, or figure out what a given organization actually needs (not always wh…

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.

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

#54

Post by Nextgrid »

denton-scratch wrote: post #45
stareatgoats wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does ERP really need customisation? Yes, for a number of reasons: 1. An ERP system consists of thousands of modules, out of which a smaller subset is needed by the customer. One typically pays by module so you want your number of modules to be as small as possible. 2. A customer this size has already implemented a number of business processes that they are not willing to sacrifice, even though an ERP provider will…

> not be on the same level playing field as the competition. Birmingham City Council doesn't have competition.

It doesn't have to be explicitly monetary/capitalistic competition. They may still see other councils as competitors and strive to be "better" on various metrics whether it is efficiency, speed of processes, etc even without any direct financial benefit.

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

#55

Post by alistairSH »

throwuwu wrote: post #21

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.

Enterprise Resource Planning.

Basically, the totality of "back-office" operations software. At minimum, it's usually accounting+finance, often including HR, sometimes also CRM. And in niche spaces, other stuff too (an ERP for higher education/colleges would also include student enrollment management, etc).

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

#56

Post by jsty »

denton-scratch wrote: post #40
candiodari wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), ...

> Things like inventory, sending out stuff, payroll (for X number of countries), Long before I ever heard of ERP, I worked on the Burroughs accounting systems. They had inventory management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, subcontractor accounting etc., all feeding into the general ledger. So is that really what ERP is? Is it what used to be called an accounting package?

With several orders of magnitude difference in workload / transaction size, and a lot more features in non-financial areas. Most accounting systems can do the bare essentials around inventory management, HR, etc. - but very few can run & form the system of record for, say, operations at the scale of an F500.

Whether it makes sense nowadays to continue stuffing these all into one system centred around the general ledger is left as an exercise to the reader.

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

#57

Post by orwin »

generic92034 wrote: post #43
orwin wrote: post #5

Leaving 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.

> 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 a pain to work with however, but unless you want to create a new module yourself, you won't need it).

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

#58

Post by rqtwteye »

namdnay wrote: post #11
peapicker wrote: post #3

Implementation partner was EY (Ernst & Young). Taking a heavily customized SAP into anything else is going to be painful, and the wrong partner for implementation can really cost.

In my experience, with these types of project, 20% of the error is on useless partners, 80% on useless clients, who have no knowledge of how their current system works, are not willing to compromise on any existing features (because it's always easier to say "no" than to try and convince others to say "yes"), and don't really care about the migration one way or the other, because they weren't really asked in the firs…

“ 80% on useless clients, who have no knowledge of how their current system works,”

I tend to think that’s true. I have been involved in some process improvements at my company and it was almost always that:

* Nobody really knows how things are working now

* A lot of people don’t want to adapt to new processes

* Execs give you a lot of verbal commitment but don’t do anything to really help

It’s really hard to implement a good software system within these constraints.

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

#59

Post by sega_sai »

_Wintermute wrote: post #46
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…

Reminds me of the University of Edinburgh this year with their own Oracle disaster, seems like it was largely on time and budget, it just didn't work: https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/23/edinburgh_university_...

It was on time, because they forced it on us before it could actually work. Regarding on budget that's not really true anymore as: "The institution has confirmed implementation partner Inoapps and software company Oracle will see the price of their contract rise from £25.4 million ($31.1 million) to £33.5 million ($41.12 million), owing to changes in requirements and additional work orders by the customer" But it's been a big debacle.
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