Keg-xistential issues: Fullers pours away £10m Infor ERP system after selling brewing business

Pub and hotel company Fuller’s has decided to ditch its Infor ERP system and search for a simplified accounts package a year after selling its brewing division to Japanese beverage biz Asahi for £250m. The UK company, which dates back to 1816, had completed the implementation of the cloud-based Infor system, and was looking …

[Julz]

Whyatt Erp

See title...

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

The aim was to provide a “single version of the truth” for financial and business performance, allowing more rapid decision-making than supported by the earlier patchwork of system

Exactly how rapid do you need to be for decision-making at that scale? If something goes across vast swathes of the business then I would expect it to be far more measured than "quick - get me a number out of the computer and I'll say 'do this' or 'do that'"

[Anonymous Coward]

One suspects that the previous systems only provided data at month-end (or worse if you really want "true" data!). Even today business decisions often need to know what happened last week and, increasingly, online product owners (not a problem for Fullers obviously) want to tweak prices, business rules and targeting after just a few hours.

[Ugotta B. Kiddingme]

truth

"Such ambition highlights one of the difficulties with ERP projects: a single version of the truth rarely survives complex business change, especially during mergers."

Having just completed a massive SAP upgrade, which included rolling in a merger slightly pre-dating the upgrade, I can only sadly nod my head and mumble something about truer words having never been spoken... Especially this bit: "£6.7m, primarily comprised of 'consultancy and incremental additional staff costs to support the project' " Now if you will excuse me, I must make an appointment with my optometrist. The last statement caused my eyes to roll beyond advisable limits and I fear something has become misaligned.

[big_D]

Re: truth

I worked on an SAP migration and re-engineering project in the mid 90s, the client "just" upgraded. I was on the project for 18 months for my part, I didn't come in at the beginning and I left long before the whole project was complete. Each month, my employer was billing the client over £1M for consultancy and project management.

['s water music]

nice work if you can get it

I was having a conversation earlier about unscrupulous workers we have known doing such things as insisting that the MS Patches need to be checked on the whole estate on a Sunday at overtime rates despite being deployed by a CM tool that has that reporting built in, or the guy who pulled the same sort of stunt checking a reg value on hundreds of VDIs by remoting into each of them with regedit instead of scripting it but these large ERP system resellers really take the biscuit

[John Smith 19]

Sounds like a case of

"Phew thank f**k that's over with."

Just an impression you understand.

It would appear they failed to consider "OK now what happens if we sell off a key division of the business" except as "Naaaa. Never happen."

[macjules]

The question is ..

Did they use Homebrew?

$ brew cask uninstall ERP

[Imhotep]

Piss It Down The Drain

I've worked with a good number of ERPs as a developer, and I'd say Infor is one of the better ones. Sounds like their problem is a lack of know how in their staff.

SAP would be at the bottom of my list.

[Roland6]

Re: Piss It Down The Drain

>SAP would be at the bottom of my list.

Suspect it will be at the bottom of their's, particularly given the outstanding contract with Infor.

Given the size of the Infor product range, there is probably a suitable "proven, appropriate and simplified accounting system." that fits the requirement.

[big_D]

Hardly legacy?

But Fuller’s brewery Infor system is hardly a legacy application.

For Asahi, it is absolutely a legacy system. It is not a core part of their systems, it is a system brought on board as part of the legacy of Fuller's operations, therefore it totally fulfils the definition of a legacy system.

In general, IT, terms, it might not be an ancient, legacy system , but in the Asahi corporate world, it is definitely classed as a legacy system.

legacy, noun

leg·​a·​cy | \ ˈle-gə-sē How to pronounce legacy (audio) \

plural legacies

Definition of legacy

(Entry 1 of 2)

1 : a gift by will especially of money or other personal property : bequest She left us a legacy of a million dollars.

2 : something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past the legacy of the ancient philosophers The war left a legacy of pain and suffering.

3 : a candidate for membership in an organization (such as a school or fraternal order) who is given special status because of a familial relationship to a member .

The second definition is pertinent to the Asahi case, this is something handed down from the predecessor (previous owners, Fuller) to Asahi as part of their takeover.

[Roland6]

Re: Hardly legacy?

>For Asahi, it is absolutely a legacy system. It is not a core part of their systems, it is a system brought on board as part of the legacy of Fuller's operations, therefore it totally fulfils the definition of a legacy system.

Err well not exactly... The implication from the article is that Fullers have simply sold just the brewery division, not the ERP system. Hence for Asahi, it is a system them have to migrate away from in double quick time. Depending on the details of the demerger contract they may only have a year to move the brewing division off Fullers ERP system.

So in some ways it is worse than legacy, unless Asahi are also an Infor customer...