Workday beats Oracle and Microsoft in UK 'Matrix' ERP deal

A cluster of government departments has opted for Workday HR and finance software, as Oracle and Microsoft make up the vendors losing out to the SaaS-only provider. The “Matrix” cluster of central government departments and arm’s length bodies has also selected Cognizant as an integrator to help roll out the systems. The group …

[Caver_Dave]

Why is it tricky

HR law is the same across the UK.

Finance/payroll also have to abide by the same UK wide rules.

So, it's just a matter of getting the incumbent staff to move away from "we've always done it this way", and to work the same way across departments.

Note: I do not work for the civil service, so I probably have missed about a million reasons why they can't all work the same way.

[Glennda37]

Re: Why is it tricky

employement law might be the same but it all really depends if they have the same contractual with their employee's as that is where the complication adds up, i/e do they all run holiday season april to april, so they all run payroll on the same day (easy one to change), this is where the complexity comes in.

[sketharaman]

Re: Why is it tricky

Only a certain percentage of HR processes are shaped by law. The rest is company and industry business process and they can vary from one company to another and probably from one government ministry to another.

[IGotOut]

Re: Why is it tricky

It seems potentially that someone with brains is in charge .

"that process of compromise and mutual commitment, and understanding where you can't add excessive customisation"

Birmingham, are you watching?

[mikus]

Anything but Oracle

After decades of hating Oracle, I can imagine any and every consumer of the product with a need for ERP would rather have the devil they don't know vs. the one they do.

The only people like anything Oracle are the ones that make money from selling it, certainly not using it.

[Penguinista]

Re: Anything but Oracle

Oh, I agree! My employer is also going down the Oracle Fusion route, and having seen the out-of-the-box implementation (because customisation of it costs even more money), it looks like a steaming turd of jankiness. But the bigwigs seem to love it (even though they are unlikely to be the ones to use it regularly), so they've bought into it without hesitation, all because of the ‘Oracle’ badge on it.

The same bigwigs are also the ones who keep lapping up costly and increasingly buggy software and systems, especially from Microsoft, and wonder why they keep getting stung with unexpected costs, unwanted features and difficult-to-replace legacy applications that prove difficult to avoid — vendor lock-in is a massively restrictive and expensive choice, with failure resulting in top dogs getting quietly shuffled out of the back door with a cushy pay-off whilst those remaining worry about where their next pay cheque is coming from and how to maintain these travesties.

Time will tell whether I'm proved right or wrong...

[trevorde]

"This ERP project is going really well"

said no-one ever!

[sketharaman]

Re: "This ERP project is going really well"

Well said! These studies claiming that "early users are struggling to get ROI from AI projects" are daft. I've been selling ERP since 1995. 30 years later, I'll bet that not even 50% of ERP buyers will declare publicly that they get ROI from ERP. As for "ERP project is going well", I'd put that at 25%.