As I said before, I give Agilent a lot of credit for not even mentioning the name of the software vendor, though I know it to be Oracle. Most likely the problem resulted from a fairly radical changeover in both systems and operational procedures, not with problems inherent in the new software. Last I checked, Agilent was using relatively antiquated systems and procedures inherited from the HP days, which no longer made sense and were incredibly expensive to continue with. I believe they needed to change them, but also recognize that it would have been a major "shock to the system." I think it's pretty classy of them to take the blame, rather than blaming the software or the consulting partner.
I don't watch cnbc too much anymore but I happened to see the Agilent CEO being interviewed by Ted David this morning. Ted did the typical "how can this happen?!" wrt the IT issue. (I might go post to Ted about some relevant questions to ask vs the *I'm shocked shocked, wasn't there a backup* drumbeat). Anyway the agilent CEO said they had some huge number (50?) of legacy systems as a carryover from the HP days they needed to consolidate... and "if you ask anybody who has been through this, it is an arduous task that ultimately results in streamlined processes going forward" (or something like that)... anyway yes I agree very classy on his part, and an outstanding show of support for the in-house staff working on the project who are probably working their tails off. I can't even imagine what it would have been like to work at Nike's IT dept with Phil Knight barking incessantly about their supply chain implementation.... do these CEOs even realize there are people in a thankless job on the other end of this?
wrt your point-
SAP were pretty shocked in 1996 when we told them that we couldn't possibly use their cost accounting/controlling solutions anywhere at Intel. But it was true. We were in that odd set of "outliers" who things so differently, and for such a good reason, that trying to find a common solution was completely a waste of time.
There is one issue with this. One of the inherent benefits of standard enterprise software is it enables consolidation with trading partners. (this is less important with accounting- more order cycle stuff). But anyway, say your warehouse decides to "go vanilla" as much as they can with Oracle or SAP. That means, when you want to sublease somebody elses warehouse or do a hub and spoke thing with fedex its no problem. Dell understands this better than anybody I've ever worked with. The problem is, when you go in to implement a system... sometimes the user community insists on implementing their "current process" regardless of how arcane or nonstandard it is. Fine with the software vendor- the question is, 3 years down the line when the fedex standard SAP api's don't work, will the CIO remember that "oh- Jeannie in receiving refused to sign off on that pick release process and made them create an entirely custom serialization technique... this was a good idea"... no, management typically acts like these customizations were "championed by the vendor!" LOL. Anyway just an opinion.
Lizzie |
