West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle West Sussex County Council faces a two-year delay to a £7.5 million Oracle ERP project once offered up as an exemplar of the company's competitive position against SAP. The English public authority, which controls net expenditure of £625 million, had planned to replace its 20-year-old SAP ERP system with a new solution based …
Not that I would defend Oracle in any way, but it is kind of hard to imagine that the Oracle engineers and technicians don't know how to install and configure their own product. I do think they have internal training on that question.
So the issue likely lies more with the civil administration who, despite having an ERP for a while already, have apparently not understood what they were getting themselves into. It's almost like they don't understand their SAP installation and, instead of trying to get to grips with it, they decided to go with another top-of-the-line behemoth only to hit their collective skulls against the same wall.
I might be reaching, but if the product you're thinking of acquiring needs more people to install it then you have people in your own IT department, maybe you should think twice before signing that contract.
This is SaaS not on-premises Oracle ERP so there is no technical installation.
I think it's more likely a mapping gap at a functional level between what SAP (and customisations!) does and what Oracle ERP SaaS does - so a shortcoming from the requirements process in the pre-selection stage OR a realisation of what's involved in migrating historical data across and an associated descoping swinging into motion. This could be IT/Finance or more likely both!
I think it is possibly a "mapping gap" between what Oracle sales staff led the council to believe they were buying for price X versus the much reduced functionality that was actually available at that price. During the "pre-design" phase there were probably a lot of "that's extra cost" revelations. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there is a much higher price tag on the project as well as on-going operational costs once the project is complete.
There is almost always a big gap between the capabilities demonstrated to senior management types and the capabilities actually made available for the price that is mentioned. The ugly truth is only revealed once the required signatures are in place, the project has begun, and the technical staff (who know what the real requirements are) start digging into the actual implementation.
That rings a bell. I seem to remember, at the start of various projects, hearing (and hearing of ) senior officers lauding all the wonderful things that some project will be able to do. But when a given project is actually in use none of these benefits seem to be available.
Even silly little things. It still annoys me after maybe 20 years that they put in loads of networkable photocopiers that would have saved us lots of money on inkjets and made doing our jobs a teeny bit easier. But ours wasn't networked - and we ( and teams like ours) with lots of little individual printers would be the ones that would have benefited. Someone told our manager they would be going to do this to us, she being pretty clueless just let them and didn't tell anyone. I spent months, even years, trying to get this sorted out. When I finally got agreement it was nearer the end of that contract, we discovered they hadn't even put a network card in the machine- and that since it was now obsolete they couldn't get one.
"One problem might be that they don't have enough people in their IT department for the existing product."
Having intereacted with the county council "IT departments" and their managers, it's a combination of "not enough people", "not enough skills" and a really bad case of Dunning-Kruger
Remember these were county councils that dropped in car parking charges on rural car parks to cover general revenue shortfalls (not legal as it happens), only to discover that motorists responded by staying away in droves. It's almost as if they could go to places which didn't have parking fees and chose to do so...
As with most failed ERP implementations, it'll be because of the 3rd party implementation partner setting unrealistic timelines and costs in their tender bid, along with a probable lack of functional and technical GAP analysis, current e2e business process mappings and up front technical / integration design.
Yes, Oracle EBS and SAP are complex beasts - but in my 20 years as an ERP Programme manager, the underlying application platform installation is rarely the problem projects like this fail.
YMMV of course.
"you don't try to fit SAP to your business... you fit your business to SAP"
That is certainly true now, especially with SAP S/$... Sorry S/4, but in the olden days of R/3 3rd party implementors were more than happy to customise SAP to do whatever you asked. Lots of lovely technical debt and future support money that way.
This is true for any ERP, though. A new ERP with new processes and functionality is a business-transformative event. It's not like installing the latest version of Word.
Many years ago, I worked on a site where the ERP system (Dynamics AX 4) had been extensively modified to run like its predecessor (SAGE Line 100). It was, predictably, full of bugs and awkward work-arounds. Naturally, the users hated this Dynamics AX 4 thing.
I'm not sure which is worse SAP or Oracle?
I don't hold much hope about it ever being completed. I'm so glad that I don't live in West Sussex although, I can walk over the border in less than 10 mins from my home in Surrey (just as bad a council mind you)
Gee, a failing Oracle project.
All the excuses they like can be trotted out, but anyone who has paid attention to the industry should be well aware that signing up with Oracle is signing up for delays and overruns ad nauseum.
Why anybody would voluntarily join the Oracle billing cycle if they weren't already participating is beyond me.
*shrug* I guess somebody was treated to some rather posh rounds of golf to start...
To be fair I remember having a conversation with someone from a Private Sector company several years back who said she'd only got most of her team's staff back after they'd spent the best part of 2 years sorting out the mess that their new ERP had caused. I said "SAP" and she wondered how I knew...
So it may be a case that ERPs are tricky to implement well for all organisations. And hard to switch between when you have one already embedded.
I've never had to use an ERP system. I've only worked with organisations that have them, so hadn't taken too much notice. Could it be that the whole complexity of integrating everything in this way isn't the best method? That may be a set of simpler systems could be better. Maybe the whole is less the sum of its parts?
I'm pretty sure that WSCC attempted to install Oracle before, at least 20 years ago and failed, having invested hundreds of thousands on licences before finally installing SAP.
When I joined the Local Authority SAP was in full swing but the Oracle "stuff" was stored away out of sight - So I am told.
I'm sure there are insiders who know..... I only learned of this from chit-chat among "old hands" in very disgruntled IT
I survived 3 years.
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