University of Edinburgh staff paid late due to Oracle ERP troubles Scotland's University of Edinburgh has paid staff and suppliers late owing to the troubled implementation of a new Oracle-based HR and finance system. Professors and postgraduate researchers at the 400-year-old institution told local media their wage pack had been delayed by two to three weeks. The Edinburgh Evening News also …
""The University recently implemented a new finance system, which required us to interrupt financial processing for a period over the summer to allow us to test the system and transfer huge volumes of data"
It seems bizarre that no provision was made for operational continuity during the transition. Did they just turn off the old system before migrating cold?
As far as I understand it, yes. The old system (which also had our 2021/2 P60s on it!) was switched off in July, and we started (supposedly) being able to use the new system some time in September (I forget when, it's all a blur, and thankfully I don't buy things). In the interim there was a manual process for urgent purchases.
Not only have lab suppliers and stationers stopped supplying us, we can't even order pizza for student welcome parties, because no pizza company in Edinburgh will deal with us.
As far as I understand it, yes
Wow. In all my years, I've NEVER seen that. It's always been the thing to run them in parallel for a time and investigate any mismatches. I certainly wouldn't be part of anything else.
In one instance, it showed up VERY erroneous paychecks from the OLD system and the new system was correct. Red faces all around.
Payroll *was* run in parallel for three months, and there haven't (as far as I know) been problems with staff pay.
However, our PhD students are not staff - they are, god help us, "suppliers" of their research, and their stipends are paid under the procurement part of the system, which is the one that has gone catastrophically wrong (as opposed to the HR part, which merely went infuriatingly and wastefully wrong).
I was a graduate student at Northwestern University in the early 80s. They made a similar transition - shifted to the new system cold, with no overlap at all with the existing system. Things went about as well there as they are going in this case - many, many suppliers stopped dealing with them. Fortunately for me, I was still getting my stipend, but some suppliers had not gotten paid in a year by the time they got things sorted out. We had some real problems keeping our lab running. Among the minor oversights, the system went live before someone realized there was no mechanism for returning money to research grants when a purchase transition got reversed.
Did I mention that the Northwestern business school had just been ranked number 1 in the United States when the university pulled this stunt?
Was the victim of a new Oracle based purchasing system at Caltech-JPL in the late 90s. Rumour was that at least one space mission was cancelled because a critical supplier went bust when no one could pay them. I remember having to take $ out of petty cash to pay for liquid nitrogen for our lab, from the university's own plant.
Ironically I moved to Cambridge just as they introduced an Oracle base purchasing system that never worked / was massively late / went over budget.
Still I suppose accounts-receivable and double-entry book keeping is one of those areas of hyper-mathematics that would take the University of Maximegalon to solve
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Don't worry. At Cambridge we're going to get to relive that all again soon as we're moving to another new finance system in a couple of years time. Having seen timelines for both this (and the replacement HR system project) I don't think I'm saying anything contentious by predicting missed deadlines.
On one occasion in a four decade career my then employer had a problem with payroll. They warned us that wages would be a week late, and offered to pay interest on emergency overdrafts to cover mortgage payments and all.
Best of luck
Edit: just seen the clarification about postgrads being paid through procurement and not through payroll. Must have misread the original article.
Like Julian Bradfield, I am an employee of Univ of Edinburgh. And, yes, this whole thing is a poo hitting the fan episode, on the scale of Scotland's entire daily sewage production colliding with a large offshore wind farm. It is affecting everything in the University, from large-scale research activities via Ph.D students' stipends down to the fact that there are no pencils and pads of lined paper in our stationary cupboard, and no immediate prospect any new stock. We have even been told to avoid printing stuff as we are going to run out of printer paper at some point.
Back when I was working for DEC, in the database division (before it was sold to Oracle), we had a presentation from a representative of one of the world's largest airline and hotel booking service companies. They said they new exactly how much money one minute of downtime cost them. Their ANNUAL budget for downtime due to system upgrades, etc, was FIFTEEN MINUTES. Everything was tested at scale, multiple times, before the production system got touched, and then one shard at a time.
Another day, another ERP (Oracle, SAP, Workday, Oracle, Dynamics, “other suppliers are available”) massive fuck-up across Education, Councils/States, Government and commerce with too many people - badly - doing largely the same business processes to the same partners.
‘UK Universities’ (as in the sector grouping organisation) in this case should be defining an agreed common platform , same as UK Councils (COSLA, LGA etc) and NHS Digital, MoD Procurement, Cabinet Office etc all should be.
Simplified systems, common process, interface and data modelling, shared investment/risk, shared services, common interoperability.
‘UK Universities’ (as in the sector grouping organisation) in this case should be defining an agreed common platform
As others have mentioned: No chance. Universities (especially research-heavy universities) live (barely!) by the phrase "Academic Freedom". In this case, it's the freedom to f**k up a project in our own special ways because we think we know better but are actually clueless*.
* We are at the bottom level of cluelessness: We're so clueless we don't know we're clueless. If we had an inkling of how clueless we were, we'd be far less dangerous.
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In June 20191582, Oracle announced the university was moving to the Cloud.
Funny that even more than 400 years ago this sentence would have made some sort of sense. Mind you, uttering that back then might have caused terrible consequences. Terrible as in: thrown in the loch with hands and feet bound to see whether you float or drown.
I had an invoice due for payment in the period when their system was down. I could have asked for and obtained an emergency payment, but it wasn't a lot, so I chose to wait. They paid it a few weeks late (on top of the usual 30 days). I guess I got lucky.
In the spring of this year, we migrated the customer's database from Oracle (2 node RAC + 1 remote node ADG, all on Windows) to PostgreSQL (2-node Corosync/Pacemaker redundancy + 1 remote node replication, all on RedHat). Preparations took almost 1/2 year, there were several test migrations (to verify time parameters, the functionality of the new system, etc).
The migration itself was performed between Friday 16:00 and Saturday evening (during which customer's employees couldn't work with the system). After that, only the new system existed.
The customer is an energy-producing & trading company; the database had a bit less than 1 TB and it contained a mix of real-time data, customer information, invoices, trading data, and such.
Btw, we are working for this specific customer since 2001-2002 and every few years there's an upgrade of both HW and our system. So was this one; moreover it included the above-mentioned database migration.
In May 2018, the University of Edinburgh experienced an Oracle ERP system outage which caused hundreds of staff to be paid late. The university said the issue was caused by a “technical glitch” and was resolved on the same day. The issue was said to have arisen after the university attempted to upgrade the system. Staff were informed of the issue by email and were promised payment as soon as possible. The university apologised for any inconvenience caused.
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