Week 1

Well, the first 7 days have gone by, and so far things are not looking too bad. If it carries on like this, then I for one will be quite pleased.

First thing on Monday morning, I was in very early. I'd made a point of getting as many people as possible to logon in last week to make sure that they knew their username / password and that they could actually get access to the production system. However, I suspected that there would be a few phones calls and I wasn't dissappointed! I had about 5 people had managed to forget their password and completely lock themselves out of the system - I was able to talk them thru getting back on. This was fewer than expected, so I was quite pleased.

Later, I had a few questions about access permissions - although we had spent a lot of time working these out, it was clear that there would still be issues after we had gone live. Some of the decisions proved to be a bit optimistic and it was found that we needed to give some of the lower level staff access to more than had been originally agreed. Again, I expected this, so it wasn't that big a deal for me - but it was for some of the managers, as they want everything done imediately and with SAP that is not always possible.

We've developed a reasonably satisfactory process for getting these changes authorised, but people still try to bypass the process and get very irate when I send their requests back to them with the instructions. However, they will learn eventually. I am getting more than I expected, about 8 -10 a day. Hopefully that will tail off in the next week, but I'm not convinced it will as I'm sure that they didn't check all of the variants prior to go-live.

We had one major discussion - a few weeks ago, there was a request for a change which I said was a bad move as it could cause a potential problem. That request was then reversed a few days later as our Operations guy found out for himself just how bad it could be. But then a week later, he changed his mind again - we needed this to allow the project team to push things thru. Then there was huge problem caused by one of these guys using the permissions inappropriately, so it was taken off - and then added back on again a week later. We've had an SAP Earlywatch report and they identified that this was major issue and that we should remove this permission - so I had to sit in a room and explain to the CEO why the project team had been given it in the first place!

There's one rather odd problem with the Sales documents - for some reason, they are printing an extra blank page in between the normal pages, so a 3 page page document comes out as 6 pages. We've got one of the consultants coming in ths week and it's been highlighted that they should look at this - I suspect that it's a formatting issue, but I haven't had the chance to work with some of these documents so I'm reluctant to play around with it at this stage.

The SAP production system is working well. So far, no complaints about speed. It's clear that some staff didn't get enough training as they are taking a lot longer to carry out a function than they should - again, I suspected that this would be the case. I felt that many had not had sufficient actual hands on work, but it was difficult to fit this in. I'm sure that they will pick up speed, they just need to concentrate on using the product.

One thing that I'm bothered about, is that some staff are still using the old legacy systems. They said that they were just referring to old data, but why would they need to? The same data is in the new system, and is just as available. I think it is a bit of a comfort blanket, and as such, I feel that it is probably OK to leave them alone for the present. However, I don't feel that we should let them use these older systems for too much longer as the data will quickly get out of step.

Anyway, so far, so good. There have not been the more serious problems that I dreaded, so this weekend I've had the chance to relax and take things easier. We are not out of the woods yet, but if it continues as it all did this week, then I for one will be quite relieved and very happy.