Hey, £18bn-revenue defence megacorps screw up ERP overhauls too: BAE took a £36m hit for delayed rollout Squirrelled away in Brit defence group BAE Systems' preliminary financial results for 2019 (PDF) is the end of a crumb trail leading back seven years to ambitious plans to replace seven legacy ERP systems with one. The new system did not start to go live until last year. In 2013, BAE Systems Military Air and Information, as …
Sounds as though it got off to the right start with all of the process re-engineering being done up-front, one wonders however if that allocation of time also included collation and sign off of use cases and NFRs etc, along with approaches for technical architecture, development, migration, and decommissioning et al i.e. all those little things that tend to derail ERP implementations if they are not properly thought through and agreed up front.
I guess it also depends whether the implementation was to be phased, or whether it was a big-bang - which is never a good idea for large scale transitions of this sort.
Holy effin' cow pats. It's already almost impossible to replace one legacy ERP system with a new one and guarantee operational continuity, how the hell did some genius think that they could go do that with seven ?
I'm pretty sure a rocket scientist couldn't solve that equation.
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon?wprov=sfla1
Mega corps have mega systems with mega problems and mega money to throw at them. If they didn't have mega screw ups now THAT would be news.
Not to worry. BAE will just stick it into the cost increase on their next few change requests that come in for their weapon systems and the government will pay for it.
I think I just found a major reason behind the delay!
(More seriously, CSC does have a lot of experience and credentials in the military aerospace area, but they have a reputation as an expensive and rather slow-moving choice. Also, replacing SEVEN ERPs with one system? That is an enormous amount of "tribal knowledge", not-fully-documented processes and disparate data and data sources to integrate into one new system.)
The Cowboys Selling Computers *used to* have a lot of experience in the military aerospace area, but then someone pointed out experienced staff cost more and often have a different interpretation of "partner" than some spotty-faced oik fresh from college who will work for less than half the salary - especially when those experienced staff were transferred from those military aerospace companies and still had some sense of loyalty to their previous colleagues (or even if they had no loyalty, still thought 200+% markup on goods and services was a bit excessive between "partners").
Who cares about local knowledge when there's a fast buck or two (million) to be made?
(Posted as AC because I am not some spotty-faced oik)
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