Global pharma firm GSK opens Pandora's Box of its SAP system to find 28,000 variations on a process The received wisdom in ERP is that businesses design their processes in the system for everyone to follow. Except they don't. Ten years after implementing SAP ECC worldwide, GSK considered its ERP unification something of a success. But a close analysis of how business processes were actually running revealed that SAP's …
Not remotely surprised. The degree to which management is generally out of touch with what actually happens in the front line is dazzling.
On one assignment I found that what managers thought was "PCI DSS compliance" consisted of filling in the quarterly "progress towards compliance" report without making any investigation - i.e. making it up in a hurry the week before submission, and this had been going on for almost a decade without anyone challenging it (either locally or at the acquiring bank).
On another assignment I found a heap of "policies" including multiple variants of notionally the same documents, some of which included reference to withdrawn standards. However they had all been "reviewed" to schedule - at least going by updates to the version listing on their front pages.
Which is why, when I do BPA I always start in the front line - they know what actually happens.
Incidentally, process mining is not a new rocket science it just BPA done right.
......a while ago, it was common for organisations to hire consultants (you know, the usual suspects, Deloitte, PW, EY....) to charge your organisation a fortune to do the configuration and implementation of SAP (...or PeopleSoft...pick your ERP flavour).
*
And here we are, much later, getting consultants (guess who) to analyse the implementation and find out just how incoherent the current implementation might be. Shock, horror!!! This needs another fortune to sort out.
*
So here's my problem with this (recurring) horror story.......what were the senior managers doing while all this was going on?
*
Could it possibly be that certain senior people were flitting from an ERP vendor to a consultancy, then to a client, then back to the ERP vendor......rinse and repeat.....with ever rising remuneration for "expertise"? Surely not........
There's an xkcd for standards which applies to 'standard' processes as well, although multiplying up to 28,000 of the things is impressive. Anyone who looks at a standard tends to think of a variation they need (want) and following that, it is a short step to multiplication of 'solutions'. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes essentially the same point about 'definitions' as applied to Social Sciences, but it is, in my experience, a generally applicable point.
As for BPA analysis, it suffers, like code from premature optimisation. As Donald Knuth famously said in his 1974 ACM Turing Lecture:
The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
Donald Knuth, Computer Programming as an Art (Communications of the ACM December 1974 Volume 17 Number 12 1974)
Removing flexibility from a process is a premature optimisation. The art of a good analysis is to leave the process flexible enough to cope with its anticipated use-cases (including the rare ones, and reasonable variations), while being standard enough to benefit from efficiencies of scale. If your process is too difficult to use, or can't be used by the users for all the things they need to do, it has failed. There's a great deal more to do than just automating the most frequently used steps and calling it a day. Sadly, that level of facile 'analysis' happens all too often.
NN
@Norman_Nescio
But a better question might be: Who's premature optimisation?
*
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I got to assess three of the "standard process models" being hyped by three suppliers:
- SAP
- Baan
- Deloitte
The idea behind the SAP and Baan "standard process models" was that instead of configuring the (huge complicated) configuration databases underneath the package, the consultants would review and adjust the process model, and some spiffy software would run against the adjusted process model and spit out the package configuration tables to match.
The Deloitte idea was different. Basically they thought it took too long (really? for consultants?) to build a client specific process model from scratch, so they would turn up and say something like: "Here's a best practice process to use as a starting point for our spiffy new reengineering effort".
Now in all three cases, the process models used as a starting point were created by either:
- software companies pushing their ERP package, or....
- a consultancy promising spiffy "best practices" to the client
In neither case does the client get to say where to start!!!! And the "premature optimisation" has already begun....done by self-proclaimed experts.
Of course, a successful company can't possibly know much about its own successful processes, can it? SAP or Baan or Deloitte (obviously) have much greater "expertise".
......and the beat goes on...................
This post has been deleted by its author
Every layer of management wants their own configuration.
Every layer of management has their own favorite consultants on contract.
All the consultants go their separate ways to configure it.
For a company as big as GSK, they're lucky some of the management layers decided to work with what they were given or the results would be even higher.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
