Congrats, HCL, on your £1.5m contract to upgrade a county council's ERP system to SAP S4/HANA within a year

A local authority in England's East Midlands has appointed HCL as the lead integrator for its SAP S/4HANA upgrade in a contract worth £1.5m. Derbyshire County Council, which serves a population of nearly 800,000, is set to upgrade to the SAP Intelligent Suite, including the installation of the S/4HANA ERP system and data …

[Korev]

Congrats, HCL, on your £1.5m contract to upgrade a county council's ERP system to SAP S4/HANA within a year

And good luck – you're gonna need it

HCL or Derbyshire Council?

[BigSLitleP]

Yes.

[Korev]

That would be an Ecumenical Matter

[Korev]

Low pH?

Will HCL ensure that the databases have ACID properties?

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

Timeline...

"The contract was expected to start in October 2020 and is set to end 30 September 2021. "

I'm assuming that this is a timeline built by bean-counters in terms of wanting to realise counted beans (i.e. benefits), rather than by any informed technical people and planning.

And in my experience of them previously, and as the incumbent SI at my current client, HCL will agree to any scope vs timeline just to get the business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Timeline...

Timed to be delivered just after the PHB who came up with this insanity to have collected a nice fat bonus and buggered off somewhere else to continue to spread their particular mix of bullshittery.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Re: Timeline...

They're working for local government. All they're going to do is change the displayed version number...

[czechitout]

Re: Timeline...

Timelines are often driven by the licence expiry of the current platform. Either way, they are almost always, as you say, completely arbitrary.

[Efer Brick]

Someone made promises

That others will have to keep

[John Miles]

Re: Someone made promises

Or lawyers will prove it is much cheaper and easier to forget than try holding them to a contract that probably didn't say what they thought it said anyway

[mikus]

Typical excuses and delays will ensue

Like most any Indian outsource firms, they will never say no for a deal, and just find excuses to delay and keep the billing deluge going. I'll be fun reading the reg follow in a year on this.

[czechitout]

Re: Typical excuses and delays will ensue

To be fair, that isn't unique to Indian outsourcing firms. Plenty of "tier one" consultancies will promise the Earth to win a contract and then use every trick in the book to move as much cash as possible from the client's pocket to their own.