Cheshire Police celebrates three-year migration to Oracle Fusion by lobbing out tender for system to replace it... one year later Cheshire cops have begun tendering for a new £11 million ERP system just a 12 months after the current one - Oracle Fusion - went live following a three-year migration. In a notice published last week, Cheshire Constabulary, on behalf of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Cheshire, said it was looking for a "supplier to …
As a citizen who lives under this Police forces area, it enrages me that no-one will be held to account. The fact that the "usual names" are up there is no surpise. It
Given that there is going to be some severe belt tightening over the next few years it takes the proverbial. I think that these massive contracts should be broken up a bit more, to allow smaller but arguably more capable firms to get some work. If one group screws up, not only not paid for it, but bared for a period of time from bidding on other work.
If I was in charge and anyone mentioned Oracle, their tender would be in the bin. Who would want to use such a has been, money grabbing, anti small business, trump supporting, litigious company?
Companies like this should be held accountable for their failure... and not feed off the public teet.
I wish. The problem, I suspect, is the bogroll of rules governing government procurements. While any sane person would immediately disqualify Oracle, Procurement rules don't allow you to do that. Just look at the quagmire that Trump threw AWS and Microsoft into over the DoD contract which will provide lifetime employment to goddess knows how many lawyers.
"If I was in charge and anyone mentioned Oracle, their tender would be in the bin. "
And with this piece of news, as soon as anyone MENTIONS Oracle you can point to it being such a staggering success that a Police force which spent 3 years rolling it out immediately started getting rid of it.
That's the kind of documented customer satisfaction that justifies "not even with someone else's ten foot bargepole"
Law enforcement systems can have unique requirements where HR and Payroll (and maybe other systems) are concerned. The inclusion of participants that are not law enforcement bodies is very strange and may be part of the problem here.
For example...someone is on the payroll but they will have an uncertain future if it is known they are on the payroll. But they still have to pay taxes on the income....
Making mug shots disappear is actually a real requirement.
Different problem. Not a good analogy on my part.
You need the ability to have some information in the systems treated as classified.
In addition there may be unusual requirements around work hours which will not be found in 'normal' work environments.
They are paramilitary organizations which brings a bit of baggage with it.
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Yet another large-scale ERP implementation disaster barely creates a ripple in the "uh-huh" crowd in the industry. Oracle implementation is very expensive because most necessary functionality must be customized. Even setting up accounts, vendors, customers, and HR rarely survives without some custom code. It's just the way it's built
Because it's built, like most other ERP systems, as a full-employment act for ERP support companies.
Imagine buying a Morris Minor and having to hire consultants to custom fit seats, tires, steering wheel, gearshift knob, windows, and even the pedals that must be custom-built just for you. It would make every Morris Minor ten times the cost. At least.
The next ERP implementation will go the same way unless the Cheshire Police lay down the law before they start.
"Imagine buying a Morris Minor and having to hire consultants to custom fit seats, tires, steering wheel, gearshift knob, windows, and even the pedals that must be custom-built just for you."
The Morris Minor you want is called Quickbooks. In the real world any company of any size has an ERP requirement that calls for some degree of customisation.
"In the real world any company of any size has an ERP requirement that calls for some degree of customisation."
There's very little customisation actually needed for a competent setup (mostly turning things OFF that are not needed)
More to the point, such ERPs need to be well written before they go in, be audited to ensure they're actually workable(*) and then rigidly prohibited from goalpost shifting.
More than one ERP has been turned down by various companies because it's unworkable, only to have some bunch of chancers say "OK, we'll build it" knowing full well that when built to spec it won't work and there's LOTS of money to be made in patching - with no gurantee required of actual usability.
One instance I'm aware of had the CEO of a multimillion dollar internet related company fire staff who said his design wouldn't work, shop it around until he got a bunch of chancers to say "yes", paid out millions in uncontracted fixes to the "broken as designed" system (which didn't work either), sued critics and then got paid very handsomely by the board of directors to go away - he came back for several more chunks of Danegeld - so that the replacement could install something that worked, for 1% of the final cost of the system which didn't. That CEO is still doing the rounds and has utterly impeccable references wherever he goes...
Oracle databases work OK.
What various companies have done with Oracle databases is very good.
Whatever Oracle themselves try to wrap around their databases turns into a clusterfuck more convoluted than trying to run a middling Regional Health Authority and 5 hospitals using MS Access (And I'm serious, I've seen this done in real life - they thought moving to Oracle was an improvement over what 40-something "programmers" had written inhouse, which to be fair was probably true, but it's easy to "improve" over a complete and utter shitfest)
Making the database open source would mean that all police departments would know that they were operating in the public eye to a degree - I'm talking about the code, not the data stored, but since the database structure would be public it would essentially "document" what was being stored, pushing the government towards doing the right thing and making it harder to be secretive about how law and order is supported by the information collected.
I am not sure how much that will help. You don't need a lot of data points about individuals to start making inferences if you have a lot of individuals, and even less to get reams of information from other government and private databases to make even more inferences.
Brilliant use of public funds there. Congratulations.
So now tell me, since it is obvious that the previous ERP was so terribly specced as to be useless, is it the same moron who is doing the specs for the new system ?
Or do you have so much money that you're just renewing ERP systems as you would go on holiday to a new island ?
At least they appear to have completed the migration.
Where I currently work, we've had a migration running for nearly 7 YEARS because the customer keeps stopping/starting. The really funny thing is, what we're migrating to is now deprecated, and we'd have to look at migrating to a product based on the source code of the software we're migrating from in the first place.
Life's funny <wipes away a frustrated tear>
"The really funny thing is, what we're migrating to is now deprecated, and we'd have to look at migrating to a product based on the source code of the software we're migrating from in the first place."
I've seen that happen on more than one occasion.... Even funnier when the deprecated software you're migrating TO is from a company that no longer exists by the time you finish the migration - and there is no support path available because no other company would touch said software with someone else's bargepole. Gotta love closed source, mostly undocumented, orphanware
I'm always rather stunned when I encounter Oracle "E-Business" suite, that anyone would ever agree to pay money for such an antiquated piece of junk. (Mind you that could be said of many products from many vendors).
It's just horrible, and based on the implementations I've encountered I'd be amazed if it didn't make just people's jobs much harder, with all the overly complex forms and the clunky user interface.
In my current line of work the HR and Finance systems have moved onto it and it's just as horrible as it was 10 years ago.
But I think there's a bigger problem really: I just don't think that this "one system to rule them all" approach is ever feasible. Time and again, large organisations from all sectors spend millions of <currency> running massive projects via the usual suspects which always run over-time and over-budget, and every time the promise is the same: One mega-system to run the whole business that is going to replace all systems that came before it and will also save the company millions.
You either take an off-the-shelf product and try to shoe-horn your existing business into the IT, which tends to fail badly; or, you buy an off-the-shelf product and spend years integrating and customising it, which then begs the question whether it would be better to pay for a bespoke product to be developed from scratch to meet the actual business needs.
Personally I think that is more productive to use a range of smaller software components across a business which are each good at the tasks they are designed for. Add in some linkage between bits where it's actually necessary, and probably a centralised SSO provider but otherwise keep it simple enough that individual components can be upgraded or replaced without having to throw out the whole thing and start again.
I agree, however the people making the purchase decisions have little or no idea how these things work. The big players (Oracle & SAP) have these products that appear all-encompassing, an easy one-stop shop. The problem is, these systems are very broad, but incredibly shallow and barely fit for purpose without lots of expensive customisation but they appear to be an easier option than buying lots of individual systems and spending additional money linking these systems together. You've then got lots of individual support contracts, and if there's an issue is it with Software A, Software B or the interface module C?
Usually when these systems are implemented they bring in a third party; said third party is often referred to as a "Systems Integrator" - thinking that you can outsource that role to an organisation that does not know your organisation intimately is not a foundation for success IMHO.
On top of that the ERP suites tend to a toxic cocktail of technologies of different vintages in their own right from a series of historical acquisitions - some of which conflict with each other - layered over by an integration backbone, some single sign-on and master data management. Sadly it is never described as such in the brochure.
Sadly I can bitch and moan but I do not have a solution. I also think that businesses have become more complex in their operation, how they are run and regulated too meaning the good old days are not an option.
I do have some ideas but they are best kept until public houses reopen. Stay safe folks!
Yes, of course, police HR is completely unlike any other sort of HR. It's the shape of the helmets, you see.
And every other aspect of the system has to be custom-coded to allow for geographic differences.
Once you are made aware of the need to have everything specially customised for your unique requirements, it's clear that you will need to pay for the best and understand that the work will take time. Lots of time
Oh, and do you realise that you need a special word processor to be able to write a good shopping list?
Actually, police HR is in many respects very, very different from non-police HR, starting off with the fact that in England and Wales (one legal jurisdiction) and in Scotland (another, separate and completely different legal jurisdiction) police officers are not employees - they are Crown servants.
But the payroll side of things is fairly standard, and there are opportunities to share the cost of (for example) payroll administration - that was actually the first thing that the MFSS was set up to do in 2012, but even then, there were problems: when I contacted the MFSS, using the details on my pay advice, to find out who the current pensions administrators were for Cheshire Police so I could request some details for a SA tax return, they didn't know.
As regards interfacing with critical systems, such those mentioned (duty management, force control, operational training), that's where it gets really, REALLY difficult, and quite probably impossible where the HR system serves more than one force.
Bags me a ringside seat to watch the fun...
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