Re: Sometimes, you should listen to your supplier
Agree 50%. I have witnessed exactly the same with two other companies. They simply do not grasp that they will have to make major changes to their existing business processes first before they can implement Oracle. I have though also seen the absolute horror on the faces of HR and Finance the evening before "go-live" when their last task is to upload the spreadsheet with all the employee ID's only to find that Fusion couldn't handle different formats (employees from one country had 9 number's, another country had 4 letters and 2 numbers etc) and the system couldn't handle this. Given that employee ID is the best unique identifier as opposed to email address which can change when married, divorced etc and can end up with john.smith, john.smith1, John.smith2 pretty quickly in a large company it was quite a shock. Even better when it turned out none of the current format of id's for any country was compatible. The work to align this, agree on one new format for all countries and to then be able to "switch" over without anyone not getting paid with so many people joining and leaving globally at any one time was quite the interesting challenge and one of course the SI could only help with if we regarded this is a change request.
The question of course was asked why, when employee ID was so critical, had the SI not mentioned this in the very first meeting! No one on our end had asked as it was assumed that of course if our old systems could handle multiple formats then Oracle would have no problem. This is so basic but highlighted to me the role of the SI is to make money and not to ell you anything that makes you realise just how much work you have to do it eternally to make these integrations work but the SI will take 90% of your budget for 10% of the actual implementation work and leave you with only 10% with much to some how manage the remaining 90% of the work.
Write down all your current business processes, map the full end to end workflows, remove data duplication in entry and processing, clean up all your misaligned data..... The list goes on and on and all this is manual work which has to be undertaken by staff, not the consultants as they have zero knowledge of your internal processes and ways of working. Then you end up having to redo a lot of your job descriptions, find out some staff no longer have work and in other areas you don't have enough etc etc etc. It's years of work with no additional resource to do it, so I disagree that the SI should be saying they told the client to do it and the client didn't do it in time and that's why the implementation missed it's go live or why it went live but with bugs. SI should be handling these two distinct phases separately and making no commitment to Oracle until the first phase is complete and the new process and way of working has bedded in (the reason their are so many training issues, not the system but the new process itself). They know though that in many cases this would then remove the business reason for blowing £30 mil on Oracle in the first place (we need to to improve our business processes, remove duplication, improve data processing etc). Best thing all round is that any company looking to spend that kind of money simply takes a minute on LinkedIn and hires someone onto staff who has actually been through a full end to end implementation so they can advise of all the issues (and benefits) upfront, otherwise the power is all in the hands of those on the other side of the table.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
