Same old, same old

I've been very busy over the last month - there have been a lot of different jobs that needed doing, and I've travelled quite a bit in the process of doing that work. So I've not really had the time to add anything. However, there is something that I am going to post about - and it involves the work that is being done for the first of our overseas sites.

As I've indicated, there is a lot of work that needs to be done for the new site before they can start to use our SAP systems. They have had a group of consultants on site now for some months - I'm not sure how many, as I originally set-up 5 accounts for them, but I know that at least two others have been involved, but as they used the accounts of the others to do the work, I'm not sure who has done what.

Originally, the staff were supposed to have had their training last year, but this never happened. I'm told by one of the staff, that they would see the consultants arrive on site, they would grab a coffee and then vanish into an office, where they stayed until late in the evening. There was no attempt made to talk to staff or managers, and they barely even greeted anyone. As of the middle of January this year, we still had no information on what training would be done when, by who or where it would take place.

Last weekend I was up at our second site - there is some work that has been scheduled for some time, and I spent several days getting it completed, getting back late on Monday night. On Tuesday morning, I walked into a major discussion between people, and spent most of the morning trying to figure out what had happened.

It turns out that a consultant we know nothing about had turned up on the overseas site to do some training the week before. This hadn't been discussed with anyone here as far as I've been able to determine, but it's possible that they had made the arrangement with the local staff, but just not let anyone here know what their plans were.

Anyway, this guy had asked one of the site managers about his user account - I set this (and the others up about 2 years ago, and had sent them all the details. I'd also created specific unique roles for that site, and these had been detailed out in a document that was given to the consultants when they started work last year.

However, the manager couldn't remember the account details - well it's been a couple of years so I can't blame him. I'm told the consultant insists that he tried to call me, but I received no call, no voicemail, no email, nothing. None of my staff were called either. So he went ahead and created a new account for the manager. As he didn't use the format that we have agreed for this, it was pretty easy to see what had been done.

He also created a new role for the manager - again it didn't use the format agreed and it was easy to spot what had been done. Rather than copy an existing role, he created one from blank and then added in a whole menu tree - I haven't counted, but it looks like there are between 3,000 and 4,000 t-codes in there. It also looks like he changed the authorisation objects so that they are set to wildcards for most of the things such as company codes, etc.

OK, so this is a pain, but it's not really that serious right? Except that he had done this directly in the production system. That wouldn't have been such an issue, but he then used that to do the training - and they have created a load of test items in the production system which are just garbage. It caused a real nightmare for the sales people as these items have shown up on their contract review, and no-one knew what the heck it was supposed to be for. Fortunately, it hadn't gone thru to production, or we would have a major problem.

I spent most of Wednesday going thru tidying up the crap that had been left. I don't know what other training is planned, but I'm hoping to speak to the manager concerned tomorrow as he is visiting us. However, it appears that he is on a tight agenda, so I may not get the time I need.

I just feel so darn tired - I think that I need to take a vacation.