SAP: loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it

We don't know, what we don't know

2012-01-29T07:58:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go back to the beginning of our SAP implementation project. That was over 4 years ago now, and at times it seems like it was only a very short while ago - at other times, it seems like we have been doing this forever.

When the original plans were put forward, it was made very clear to everyone that this was not a normal IT project. Although there were some technical issues that only IT were getting involved in, the majority of the work was actually to be done by staff from across the business, and would involve people at all levels, in all departments. We knew that it would take time, and altho' the SI promised otherwise, I was fairly sure that it would take a lot longer than planned.

An ERP implementation (of any flavor) is always going to be a much bigger task than most others - it requires a lot more work because so much of the product integrates data and processes, and it is important to make sure that what happens in one area, doesn't impact on another. There are many things to consider, and even for those businesses that have a clear understanding of what they do and how they do it, the implementation project is going throw a few curve balls into the mix.

Added to that, most ERP products (including SAP) will have specific ways of doing things, and it is important to learn how to do these correctly. With most software programs, it's possible to buy a book, work with a demo verison and learn all you need - OK, somtimes, you also need to undertake specialist training, but with an ERP product, this is just not practical due to the size and complexity of the program.

For that reason, it's necessary to buy in the expertise required. Some companies will do this by hiring extra staff that have had previous experience, sometimes on a permanent basis, but more often as contractors. A more common approach is to use a System Intergrator (SI) which will be a organisation that has prior experience of working in the specific area with the particular product. The really big companies will use one of the big consultancy firms - for the SME type business like us, it's more usual to make use of the medium size or smaller SI.

The idea is pretty simple - the SI will supply people (consultants) at a set rate that have the required expertise. These people will then help us implement the software by providing technical expertise, passing their knowledge onto our staff, and guide us thru the various steps. This should reduce wasted time, enable us to get up to speed quickly, and ensure a succesful project. Well, a good idea in theory!

The problem is of course, that when learning new stuff, you don't know just what you need to know. Certainly if you have been involved in projects, you will have an idea of good project management practices - if you have worked with larger companies, you will understand the need for good communications and dissemination of information. You may even know how to manage project teams and stakeholder requirements. But in the case of SAP, if you have not worked with it previously, it is unlikely that you will know much about the practices required by that product, which is why people buy in those consultants.

That of course presumes that the consultants do know the stuff that we don't know and are willing and able to pass that knowledge on to our staff. Unfortunately, as we have seen that is not always the case. As you might imagine, after the issues that we have had to deal with over the last few weeks, there was a meeting to identify what happened and how to prevent it happening again. At the meeting, it was pretty much agreed that the problem was caused by the consultants not following proper procedure - the procedure which they are in fact supposed to be teaching us.

Of course, the SI dispute this - their people are doing their job and trying to help us by getting the work done as quickly as possible. Their arguement is that it is down to us not following correct procedures and incorrect testing of the work.

I will say that I would not totally disagree - I don't think we always do all of the testing that we should. We also should have the settings locked down much more than they are specifically to protect us from this sort of thing happening. But the problem is that if their people don't set and follow correct procedures, how can our staff know what is or is not the correct way to do something? What's worse is that if people learn bad practice, it is generally much harder then to change the way that they work.

Well enough for now. There are going to be some meetings in the next few weeks, and these will have an impact on what we do next. I am actually looking forward to it, altho' I suspect that I may not feel so pleased afterwards!

Spoke too soon...

2012-01-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

I did say last time that we had fixed the issues caused by some bad config changes, and that we should be back to normal. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun a bit - we were still having some issues right up to the beginning of the week.

To be fair, these were mostly smaller issues - someone found that they couldn't post a purchase order because one of the items on the list had some mis-matched data. There was a similar issue when the guys in the warehouse were trying to assemble some stock to a delivery. Late on Friday, there were a couple of invoices that went wrong - and all of this was from data problems caused by the consultant loading config changes directly into the Production client.

We've locked the client against config changes now, but in reality, that won't stop it happening again. The consultants have the ability to unlock the client, and there's not a whole lot that I can do to prevent this. I have detailed what we need to do, which is to limit what access permissions they have, but whenever I make that point, the consultants start complaining about being "unable to do their work".

I will say that quite some time ago, I had the chance to speak to one of the consultants that we had on site for only a few days, and from what she said, it is clear that they generally don't get a lot of support or management when they are working on a customer site. She was quite new to the company, and to SAP, and it was clear that she felt a little out of her depth. She was being asked questions by people from our project team, and all she could do was refer it to one of her colleagues - she just didn't have the experience to handle many of the issues herself.

This is an item that has been raised before, and I know that a couple of the more experienced guys that are SAP Mentors that follow this blog, have also raised questions about the skill levels of many consultants. A given person may have a valid certification, but without at least some practical knowledge, that person might not be much more use than one of our own staff.

For me tho' the main issue seems to be that most of the people that have worked on our project don't seem to know much about basic good practice. I understand that time is money, and they want to get the job done as quickly as possible, but cutting corners is usually going to cause problems. Someone else made the comment that you can do it quick, do it cheap or do it right - but not all three, and we have seen that many times.

This is not made any better by not having any one checking to make sure that these people are following the right procedures. It seems that the SI wants to make that our job - OK, I can see why that is their preference, but at the beginning, we would have no idea what that good practice might be. We know more about it now, but in many ways, it's just too late. They have worked to fairly poor practices, and as a result, we also now have some fairly poor practice in place, and it's not easy to change that.

Well, we have a few new things being developed now - I won't be able to write about them for a little while, but I think that we have some interesting times ahead.

It's broken...

2012-01-14T04:53:00.001-08:00

Last week, I made a comment that “the consultantswere still working on config changes”, but didn’t go into any details. I can goback over that now…

So I made the point that the consultants were stillmaking some config changes, and doing so directly in the Production system.Normally, all changes should be done in the Development system, checked, thentransported to the Test system, before being checked again – and only when itis proven that the changes won’t cause any functional issues, do they then gettransported to the Production system.

Now there are certain changes that have to be madedirectly in a system as they cannot be transported. However, as far as I amaware, SAP best practice still highlights that the correct procedure is to makethe config change in the Development system and then once it has been testedmaking the same change directly in the Test system. It then gets tested againbefore the change is made directly into the Production system.

The reason for this is simple – if you have a livesystem, any change can have undesirable effects. If your business is reliantupon a system, you want that system to work all the time – you do not want itgoing wrong, or working incorrectly. If you follow the correct procedure, youshould be able to ensure that any change made will not turn around and bite youin the ass.

But of course there are those people that choose notto follow procedures because either they don’t know any better, or because theythink that they do know better. (Dare I suggest that some simply do not care?)In our case, I don’t believe that it is malicious, but I feel that the peopleconcerned have never had to work to the appropriate disciplines.

On Monday morning, people found that they were notable to post anything in the production system. As I arrived at work, it becameclear that we had a crisis on our hands. The CEO and FD were already there,discussing the problems and trying to get answers on what had happened and whythings were not working.

After investigation, it became apparent that one ofthe consultants had really messed up – the config changes added to the systemwere physically preventing any new data from being added and quite a lot of theolder data from being processed. I got everyone out of the system in case arestart of the server might fix the issue, but that was no good. After manyhours of discussion with the people concerned, it became obvious that the onlyway to fix the issue was to reverse all of the changes.

That work has been going on all week. In that time,no-one has been able to do very much in SAP – there were a few jobs, somereports could be run, but not very much. Fortunately, the factory was able tocontinue working for several days as we had some info left over from theprevious week, but that dried up after about 3 days. At one stage, thedirectors were even considering closing down production and sending people homeand putting plans in place to do this.

However, by midday yesterday, all of the configchanges that caused the problem have now been undone, and people were gettingdown to running the stuff that they had not been able to do. A couple of thestaff from Sales will be working on Saturday and they hope to catch up withwhat they have missed – Finance have managed to organise 2 billing paymentruns, and they are staying on for a couple of hours to get the invoices in themail.

Meanwhile, the Production manager has started to runone of their scheduling jobs, and the Production Supervisor will try to runanother later tonight. I doubt that we will be back to normal by Monday, but weshould be more or less OK by Tuesday lunch time – evening at the latest.

So of course, everyone is pretty angry about this –but so far, no word of apology from the SI. The CEO has told them in no uncertainterms that any attempt to bill us for the work will be rejected. I think thatwe ought to get some sort of compensation, but based upon their previousmess-ups, I think that is highly unlikely to happen.

So we have managed to escape a major disaster – yes,things could have gotten a lot worse, and other people have suffered far worsethings that we have. But I do feel that we should have not been exposed in thatway to begin with, and I do get frustrated that we are suffering because ofother people’s behaviour with apparently no recourse to compensation.

Not so happy new year

2012-01-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

The new year has come and gone; so our overseas site must have gone live, right? Unfortunately, no.

Although we technically stopped work for Christmas, I was getting emails and phone calls right thru the holidays. I started to feel a little concerned as it looked increasingly like they were struggling with some basic stuff; and on New Years eve, I got a call to tell me that the go-live was postponed until the end of January.

Despite the fact that I had asked many times if the data had all been loaded (and been told that it was), the actual situation is that there are still a number of items of master data that have yet to be loaded. Little things like a load of customer and supplier information, bank details, a lot of product information and the open activity etc.

On top of that, the consultants were still working on config changes (more on that next time) up until Christmas eve - but then stopped work until the first week of January, and so there's a substantial number of items outstanding that haven't even been looked at.

I was asked to go over to the site along with the VP of operations - we had a really bad flight over, then problems at the airport with a lost bag. This delayed us getting to site by several hours, which was made worse by the cab driver taking the wrong route.

By the time we got to the site, he was not happy at all. The consultants were watching some video on a laptop and howling with laughter which really did not sit well with him. When he spoke to the consultants, he made the point that he had been told that everything would be ready, and the delay was down to them entirely. He also said that he did not see why we should continue to pay their company if they were not able to do the work that they themselves had agreed to.

Subsequently, he had a conversation with the director of the SI - who didn't apologise for any of the issues or the delay, but suggested that our VP should apologise for being too demanding! To be honest, I stayed out of it as much as I could - but the conversation we had at the hotel that night showed that our VP is not impressed, and I think that he will not leave this point alone until he gets satisfaction.

So, we spent a week on site, going thru the outstanding items, and trying to get these covered off. Surprisingly, we did manage to get a lot done while I was there, and altho there are many areas still not finished, we could be on track and be ready to go-live in about another 3 weeks.

I will say that I am still a bit concerned at the moment. The consultants have the staff at the site doing some training - by entering data into the live system. Now I accept that it is live data (from real orders etc.) but this should be done within the test system, not the production system. But hey, what do I know about anything.

Some of the results they get are not quite right - well that's to be expected if it's not been tested as it should. They have had to go thru some of the data to make amendments, and they had to make a couple of other config changes that had been put into the test system, but not the development or production system. Before you ask, they still haven't put them in the dev system.

So here we are again - waiting for work to be done that I was told categorically had all been finished. I am planning to go back over again in a couple of weeks, but possibly that may be sooner. I'll try to keep you updated.

We have definitely been here before!

2011-12-22T06:57:00.001-08:00

We are rapidly approaching the point for our overseas site to go live – they are due to start using the SAP production system starting on the first working day of the new year. As we only have a few days left before Christmas, there is not a lot of spare time.

The data loading process has been going on for some time now - I asked about how they were getting on a while ago. I was told that it was all done – but when I pressed a bit harder, it was admitted that there were a few items not quite finished. (Such as bank details, purchasing info records, part of the master material, some of the customer’s data and some other equally inconsequential items!) The work to load this is still going thru, but I would not be surprised to find it incomplete on day 1 of their go-live.

It also has to be said that there are still some items that have yet to be configured. Two weeks ago, it was agreed that we would stop all further changes in order to concentrate on the data load. It was suggested that I would do any further role change requests, as this could be arranged at a time when there would be no issues with processing the transports (as it happens, there has been no need for this). However, one of the consultants apparently didn’t get the message – a change was made, pushed thru without reference to anyone and a whole day was spent undoing some of the issues created.

In the mean-time, the SI has sent a letter of complaint that caused some internal discussion. There are a lot of bills that they have submitted that our FD simply will not pay. Of these, more than half are for work they say was done, but that we have no evidence for. For example, they had a person on site for several days over a 3 week period according to one bill, but the person concerned had left their employment and was working in a country on the other side of the world on the dates that they supplied. There have been items for 100s of miles of travel and a night’s accommodation for the same day. Just to really stick the knife in, they also changed the agreed daily rate billed on some of the items – and when the FD asked who had authorised this, they were unable to give him an answer.

Over the past few months, I have also been trying to look at ways that we can make more use of our SAP system. It seems to me that whatever I might think of its capabilities and shortcomings, having spent as much money on the project as we have, we should try to make sure that we get the most bang for our bucks. There is a specific process that one of the managers has been wanting to do for several years, and altho I have a few concerns about it, it seems that this could be done within SAP. Part of the work is already done, which is a plus – it would just need slightly more data being entered than before.

His concern (and it is a valid one) relates to the output – he wants to do specific things with that, and it was subsequently suggested that it could also be used to improve some of the data provision to customers. These are all very consistent with company strategy and I want to encourage him. However, there are some concerns about how it would be done, and at present we don’t yet have the necessary specific skills internally – this would then require we buy in more consultancy.

Because of those concerns, he has recommended that we look to buy another software product – and to me, this is just utter madness. He wants the company to allocate another $300,000 to fund his project, but what really bothers me is that it would then duplicate the work being done, require more hardware, more software (plus licences, maintenance etc.) and he’s suggesting that it could be at least a year before the project would have any output worth using. Color me crazy, but that does not seem like the best way forward when we have already paid as much for SAP as we have, and could do the job as well by spending a little more on getting some training done.

So – the holidays are nearly upon us. Decorations are up, the tree is dressed, presents are wrapped, parties are being organised. We seem to have enough food in the house to last for the rest of the winter – I’m told that we are inviting lots of friends & family around this year and we must of course provide hospitality (I don’t remember having THAT discussion!).

As this will be my last post for 2011, I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, and I hope that whatever the holidays mean for you, that you enjoy them in the company of your friends, family or loved ones - and may the New Year bring you all the success that you would wish.

Back to the training board

2011-11-21T16:30:00.001-08:00

I've not posted anything for some weeks - mainly because I've not really had anything to add. Work continues as normal, but there has not a great deal happening with our SAP project.

The go-live date for our overseas site was put back to January of next year. This should have given us time to get some of the data load done, but very little has been added so far. We still have time, but we are still waiting for much of the data, which is still to be cleaned up.However, the staff at the overseas site have actually been doing some training, and they have also been testing what data has been added, as well as manually adding some data of their own. I think that this will be very useful as it means that they will be more comfortable once they start using the system for real.

One thing that has been discussed in some depth is an old favorite of mine - training. I've said a number of times that I feel we should be enhancing our internal skills by getting our project team members and perhaps even some of our end users to attend formal SAP training.To me, it makes sense to invest the money in our staff, and retain knowledge within the business, rather than pay consultants who will be here today, gone tomorrow.

The costs are pretty straight forward - pay a consultant $1500 per day, or get staff on a 2 day training course for about the same money.I'm not sure how many times I've discussed this with people - probably to the point where I get boring. But I've been on some courses, as have some of my staff, and we know the value of the training, and can demonstrate the benefits.

To me, it is so simple - and yet our project team haven't seen it that way.I believe that part of the issue is that I am used to the idea of continuous training - anyone in IT will know the value of this and the need for constantly renewing skills. On top of that, I am also used to the requirement of managing my own training - but clearly, this is not how others see it.

However - it seems that my message is slowly starting to sink in. I've recently had a number of members of the team speak to me about organising training, and it seems likely that they will now carry this thru. The only problem is what courses will be of the most benefit and how to make sure that they get the most from the courses.

I am aware that if they attend a course and it doesn't meet their expectations, they will be less likely to want to go on another. I'm therefore trying to make sure that we have a very clear roadmap of the appropriate modules for each individual. I'm not so sure about the need for some of the certfication tracks - I don't consider it necessary that we need to get people qualified, but we should try to make sure that the plans follow a pattern that will provide appropriate knowledge in each area.

One thing that has been noted - the project team members are a bit more vocal in the way that they describe the lack of knowledge transfer from the consultants. They also seem a bit more prepared to criticize the quality of work carried out, and several of them have highlighted key areas that they want to cover in training that have been those where the consultants did not achieve what was required. I'm not sure that we can do this straight off, but I don't want to put them down too quickly - I'd rather try and keep their new enthusiasm high for as long as possible.

I suppose that once one of them goes on a course and then comes back and can confirm to the others the value of what they have learnt, we will then see a sudden rush of the others - well, that's OK as far as I am concerned. We have a decent sized budget now for the training as long as we can continue to justify it, so I want to see it used to best effect.

Hopefully, I'll have some feedback from at least one of them soon.

Have we been here before?

2011-10-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

So - we were supposed to go live at our overseas site today. Up until Wednesday of last week, they were still determined that it would go ahead, come what may. This was despite no more than 10% of the data having been loaded, and we are still waiting for quite a bit of data to be extracted from their legacy system.

I only finally got the confirmation of the delay midday on Thursday - it's been put back to December at the moment, but I'm not sure if that will stand either. I know that the site manager is relieved as he was really concerned that they are just not ready, and I believe that most of the staff there are equally pleased. Our project team are not entirely happy - but they all accept that it would be too much of a risk to try and go ahead.

Now we have a bit more time to try to resolve some of the issues that are still outstanding - but I'm a bit concerned that we may end up with a few more as well. There have been a couple of config changes made and once again, it has caused us some problems. (Did someone mention testing?)

This time it's the purchasing, which is a real pain as that has actually been pretty good for some time now. It appears to be to do with the release strategy - the change means that staff can release purchase orders to any value, instead of the staged release which took us about 3 months to get right. I left the manager in charge of the purchasing department working his way thru a number of items to try and get a handle on exactly where it has gone wrong.

The consultants fixed the printing problem on the purchase order - well almost. There's a bit of an issue with the vendor addressing and a number of the POs have completely the wrong details. I got a message earlier today to tell me that there is a specialist going to take a look - it appears that he has already had access to the system, but he's been using someone else's account. I've now created an account for him, and asked him to use that - I've had no response, so I don't know if he hasn't received the message, or just can't be bothered to do so.

There was also an issue on the finance side (not quite sure what it was) and they had arranged for a consultant to look at the problem - we were told that it would take them about 4 / 5 days. However, the FD was looking at it, and with the help of a Google search, he has fixed the issue. The SI are not pleased at this.

Talking of the SI, I've had one of their people chasing me to outsource the systems to them. This is something that I'm not particularly keen on for a number of reasons. They insisted that it would all be managed in a facility in this country, but when I checked, the data center they use is actually somewhere else in the world - I think it might be either eastern Europe or Malaysia, I've not been able to clarify.

Their sales guy insisted that it would be cheaper to use them - well there would be savings in hardware / software / utilities, but I doubt very much that it would work out any cheaper. Some time ago, I looked into the costs, and based upon what we would need, the price from the only hosting center prepeared to give me an estimate would indicate that we would be looking at $300,0000 a year now, rising to $600,000 in about 3 years time. I can tell you, that would be more than our current IT budget.

However, it's not just the cost that worries me - this system is going to be the key system for the whole business. A decade ago, it wouldn't have mattered if it went off line for a few hours or even a day or two - that's not the case now. Quite simply, a loss of service of more than a few minutes would be problematic, more than a hour could be disastrous.

Based on their performance, can we trust our key system to them? Of course, it's not just the potential loss of service. I don't feel that they have demonstrated that they work in a particularly secure mananer, and I'll be honest, the thought that they might lose data scares the heck out of me. However, it won't be my decision anyway - this is something that the board will decide. Apparently, they are arranging for a junket at a country club for the shareholders and the board, to advise of them how it would work - I have not been invited.

However, I have been asked to put together a presentation of my concerns, highlighting the costs. I've also included some statistics on what we have achieved and how much we have saved by doing it all inhouse. In addition, I've put forward some plans for future development that would allow us to ramp up the resources to deal with required increases as the other sites come on line. We'll see what happens.

Back overseas again next week. I'm really racking up the frequent flyer miles - next time, I'm taking my wife with me!

I'm Back!

2011-09-25T03:17:00.001-07:00

I’m back! Before you ask, I had a great time thank you.

Unfortunately, the flight back was delayed – and we got home very late on the Sunday. There were a number of messages waiting on the ansafone (I hadn’t taken my cell phone), and essentially, the messages all said that I was to get over to our overseas site asap. So I packed a fresh suitcase, and got my flights booked – with an early flight, the time differences plus the delays the day before, I was really very tired by the evening.

I spent the week over there, and then it was decided that I should go back again this last week. What with that plus trying to do my normal work and various other chores, this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and analyze the situation.
I’ve not been told officially, but it appears that a number of staff have been told that the overseas site will not be going live in October after all. I’m not surprised – the data load was supposed to have started the 1st week of August and it hadn’t started by September. Even now, very little data has actually been loaded, and it appears that there are still some unresolved issues with parts of it.

During my first week over there, I spent a bit of time doing some training – about half of the staff there had still not even logged onto the test client, and they are a long way from being confident in using SAP. I also had a very upset General Manager complaining that there was a printing problem. When I checked, it was actually only one document that had the problem – the sales order form, so rather important that they gets this fixed.

I haven’t done that much work on the smart forms, but I took a quick look, and discovered that one their consultants had made the change. Unfortunately, no-one knows why or what for, and the guy isn’t available. I’ve left it to them to chase up, but so far, it’s still not printing at all.

Another issue has also appeared recently that affects the financials. At first, the consultants suggested that it was an authorization problem, but we’ve now identified that certain products are being assigned to the wrong ledger code. Again, no-one is really quite sure why – we have our consultants telling us that the configuration was correct, and their consultants are saying that it’s not. So they’ve made a change and now we have a problem.

Our Accounts Manager is really upset about all of this. A couple of times now, she has spoken to me in private, and it’s clear that she is very distressed about the whole scenario. She’s been with the company a long time, and has been thru some really tough times, but I think that this is the worst she has ever felt about her job. I just don’t know what to say to her anymore.

I’m also a bit concerned about the amount of testing that they have done. If you’ll remember, a bunch of us went over back in April, and we did some full end to end testing of processes and made sure that everything worked – but that was only using a limited amount of test data.

The guys on site have access to the test system and although not all of the live data has been loaded, about 80 – 90% is available. But the testing that they have been doing is not the same end to end testing. Yes they have put a whole ton of quotes, purchase orders, sales orders on the system, but they have not then followed this thru to make sure that orders appear on the MRP or that sales get billed.

It could be argued that we shouldn’t need to test again, as it was proven to work in the development system and we are using the processes in the production system. But the issue is that their consultants have made a few changes and I strongly feel that we can’t be absolutely sure that any of their tests would actually work unless we do try it out.

I did manage to speak to the GM of our overseas site one evening over a beer – he is very much of the opinion that they will not be ready for the start of October. He did suggest that perhaps they could have a staged approach to the go-live, perhaps by working in tandem on both systems. I wouldn’t have a problem with that in principle, but they don’t have that many staff, and I’m not sure they could actually do that.

Oh well, back in to work tomorrow, and maybe I’ll find out a little more about what the plans are.

Problems with prices

2011-08-20T12:49:00.001-07:00

About 4-5 months after our go-live, I received a request for a change to a role. At that stage, we were still making quite a few changes as we discovered issues that had not been uncovered during the testing phase. This was quite normal, but something about the request didn’t seem quite right.

The particular role was one that I had worked on with the sales manager, and the request from our second site seemed to indicate that there was a problem that should have affected everybody. When I went into it in more detail, I wondered if it was due to the staff concerned not entering the correct information.

I passed this back to the relevant key user from sales, and she confirmed that the process was working for each site – it seemed that this was an issue with staff training. So the sales manager organised a quick refresher session with the sales staff at the second site.

Whilst he was going thru this with them, he also spotted an issue with the cost price of one item that they were using. Quite simply, the cost price shown in SAP was way out – in fact, even with the price uplift, they were actually selling the item at a loss of about 25c each for a selling price of just under a dollar. He then started checking a few other items – most were OK, but there were more than a few with a price that was wrong.

Subsequently, they spent some time going thru the rest of the price list to make sure that this was OK – and based on what he found, the second site had lost just under $10,000 in incorrect pricing during those first few months due to an incorrect price having been loaded during the data load process.

An investigation proved that the price had been wrong in our old system. At some stage, the price had gone up but never been altered in our old ERP system. No-one knows how much we lost in total, but most agree that it’s probably over $25,000 for each of the previous 4 years – a total of at least 100 big ones. You can imagine that there were some people that were very unhappy about this.

The reason I raise this now is that we were doing the training with our overseas site just over a week ago, and it appears that they also had the same incorrect prices in their old system. This has caused some real upset as people are trying to uncover when things went wrong and why. I doubt that we will ever know.

Of course, one thing we can say is that is not down to SAP. The problem occurred long before we started the implementation. It could be argued that this should have been picked up at the data cleansing phase, and that’s probably true – but it wasn’t. No matter what anyone thinks of the software, there is a limit to how much it will cope with the failure of the human element.

So chalk one up for SAP – while the correction of the price won’t cover the costs of the software, it’s identified a major problem that has taken money off the bottom line, and one that would quite possibly not have been discovered for many years. Although there are still questions about getting an ROI for the project, each of the areas where it has made a difference will help to justify the decision to buy it.

Oh well, vacation time is here. I feel that it is overdue, and am looking forward to a good break.

None so blind...

2011-07-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

I started to write this item a couple of weeks ago – but didn’t finish it at the time. I was highly annoyed and wanted to think about things before posting.

We actually started work on the SAP rollout at our overseas site almost 2 years year ago. However, nothing was ever completed, even in the development system and eventually, the project stopped before being started again with a new set of consultants in the middle of last year. The plans then were to go live at the end of October last year – as the previous consultants had done quite a bit of work, it was felt that this was achievable.

However, it quickly became clear that most of what had been done was of no value. Essentially, it all had had to go right back to the very beginning. The SI were still trying to say that October 2010 was achievable, but most people on our project team could see that was never going to be possible. A date was set for the end of July this year – most people agreed that this could be done if all went well.

As it happens, in April of this year, the consultants still had not finished working on the development system. We also had issues because almost no testing had been carried out, and absolutely no training had been done either. Our project team then went to the site to do some work, and as I’ve indicated, we managed to get a great deal done. So much in fact that we all thought it might still be possible to go-live in July. There is still major work being done by the consultants, but from experience, it seems to be normal for them to still be working on items right up to (and even after) the go-live date.

But there has been a major problem with getting data loaded. First getting data out of their existing system has proven to considerably more difficult than anyone believed would be the case. Cleansing the data was also a bit of an issue – but the biggest problem has been getting it matched to the relevant data load into SAP. I had been told by the SI that about 80 - 85% of the data load had been completed into the development system – but during our test phase it became very clear that it was really closer to 10 - 15%.

Since then, some data has also been loaded into the test system – but no more than about 30 – 40%. Some training has been done with key users, but none with the rest of the end users. I had to go over there again a few weeks ago, and they were trying to do some testing work in the test system. Most of this failed simply because there was insufficient data to allow more than few test scripts to be used – it took them as much as half a day to complete a single test item.

As it became clear that July was slipping away, a decision was made to move the go-live date back yet again. This makes sense, and I have no issue with that other than once again, we are committing many resources to the project than was originally planned. But what has outraged me is a decision that has been made following further discussions with the SI.

The director of the SI suggested to our senior managers that we did not need to complete the data load process in either of the development or test systems, but simply go straight to the production system and load the data without having to do any testing. The argument was that we had done a few items so that proved the process worked and therefore any further data added to the same process would also work. He also argued that if we needed to have data in the other systems, it would be easier to do a system copy after the go-live.

I tried to point out that this view was completely wrong – we have seen repeatedly that people make mistakes when preparing the data. In some cases, the mistakes are so significant that the data will simply not go into the database without considerable manipulation by the people carrying out the work. To trust that all of the data will load correctly just because you have loaded a few lines is at best, wishful thinking in my opinion. As far as I am concerned, completing the data load process in the development and test systems should then save time and effort when loading into the production system.

But there we are – I can do no more than point out the issues and then do my best to see if I can fix the problems when they occur. But I must admit that I am now really beginning to feel that I can do no more on this project. I feel so frustrated all of the time – all I hear is that everything is going well, when it is abundantly clear that things are far from satisfactory.

I have no problem people trying to maintain a positive attitude – I can see that sometimes this is a necessity. When something requires such a major business transformation as SAP, it is essential to keep everyone motivated. But what worries me is that we are seeing “ostrich management” – burying their heads in the sand in the hope that if they don’t see the problem, it will just go away. I can’t believe that will be any good for us, now or in the future, on this project or any other.

Eye of the beholder

2011-07-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the manufacturing plant of another company. These people started to work on SAP a couple of years before us, and I had been told that they had been successful – so I was interested in talking to them in a bit more depth.

I had the chance to talk to the IT manager on site – a nice enough guy, although he seemed a little distant. As we talked, he made the point that they had gone live after just 8 months and they had experienced no problems. I won’t say that he was being arrogant, but there was a definite sense that he was as far as he was concerned, their project had gone very well indeed, and he was more than a bit proud of that. When I told him of our project and how long it took, he made me feel a bit bad.

However, I also had the chance to their production guys, and they had a slightly different story to tell. A few days after go-live, the system had gone down, and it took a couple of days before it was working again. They didn’t know why, all they knew was that it caused a few problems for them. That was bad enough, but it appears the same thing happened on several occasions over the next 4-6 months. Added to that, it appears that they still have an on-going issue relating to some of the data that they are accessing – they couldn’t tell me why.

After that, I spoke to a couple of their finance people. They remembered the first few months as being a complete nightmare caused by a series of issues with billing documents, financial reports and figures just not adding up. It appears that most of these are sorted, but they still recall those problems and again, they are still finding issues on a regular basis.

Later when I checked, it seems that there is quite a difference between the size of the projects, even tho’ the companies are about the same size. They have a lot fewer products than us, and there was a lot less to do on data migration. In addition, they don’t use a couple of them modules that we are using – and these items were seen as being responsible for a good proportion of our delays. Possibly our project might not have taken so long if we had been in the same situation as them.

When I thought about it later, it seemed to me that this is a case that the individual people were really only concerned about what had happened within their own areas of the business, and the project had been judged by that. As far as IT was concerned, the project went well because it came in on time and budget – the other issues were irrelevant. But for the other departments, they could only see the issues that had caused them major problems. Even years later, they don’t see their SAP project as being that successful.

I was once told by a CEO that he liked me because I looked at the bigger picture, and in his experience, most people in IT just didn’t do that. I can appreciate that the IT manager in this case was pleased with the project and felt that his team had performed well – but I could also see that the other departments were not as happy and for valid reasons. OK, they did get things sorted, but it was clear that it could have been a lot worse for them. When I compare that to our project, I don’t feel quite as bad.

I think that with an ERP system, it is important that people look at it from an over view rather than just within their own specific areas. If I think back, it seems to me that when things weren’t going well, it was because it was a single person or a couple of people working on their own without involving others. When things went well, it was because we were working as a team.

I know that the SI have been telling people that our project was a success – and if you look at it from a particular perspective, they are probably right. SAP is working for us, and in some respects, it has achieved some of the primary requirements. From the company point of view, that’s not the whole story – the project has been very expensive and taken a lot longer than we had been told it would. In some areas there has been no benefit or processes are much more difficult – in other areas, we have seen improvement or there is an indication that we may see this in the future.

Essentially, it seems that the quality or success of an SAP project is very much in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I would rather judge on well it achieves the requirements stated at the beginning of the project – but then, that’s just my opinion.

Paperwork

2011-06-18T11:20:00.001-07:00

Right back at the beginning of our project, I talked to the SI about the need to provide us with detailed information concerning what changes they had made to the system. To me, this is just good practice – any time that someone makes a change to a system, it should be documented. There are a number of reasons behind this – people are not always available to confirm what has been done, jobs change and people move, security and audit issues etc. so good documentation is really important, especially before you start making other changes.

The SI promised that we would have full documentation, and they did indeed send us a document once we had gone live. However, it contained almost no actual information on the changes made, other than some flow charts to show processes and was quite a small document compared to the work done. I queried this at the time, and was told that this was standard SAP documentation – when I pushed a bit harder, the guy concerned got really snotty with me. His view was that this was the same format provided to everyone else implementing SAP, and those people had no issue with it, so I should just accept it and stop complaining.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to see if I could find a way to uncover what config chnges had been done, but I must confess that with all the other work going on at the time, I simply could not keep track of what was happening. It also became pretty difficult to maintain details of who was working on what, when, why and what they did. We had an issues list, and for the most part, this is now our primary resource for determining what work was carried out.

As it happens, when we applied a number of support packages, we found several issues. After investigation, it was determined that some of these (not all of them) were down to config changes having been made, and this caused a number of delays until we could complete various work to deal with the situation. It definitely took much longer to do the updates than it should have, and the delays impacted other work.

However, about a year after we went live, we had another consultant on site for a few weeks. When he left, he handed over a really detailed document that we still have – it gave information on what he had done, what changes, what code even. The file was everything that we had previously asked for, and exactly what was needed. It ran to a couple of dozen pages, and was really helpful as we could then refer to it when there was a question about an issue a few weeks after he had gone.

As you can probably tell, I think that this is a very sensible and professional way to work. I raise the subject because there is a particular consultant that has been doing quite a lot of work on our systems, and a couple of weeks ago, we found out that he has now left the SI. The trouble is that he has documented nothing – and I mean absolutely zip. No-one at the SI can talk to the guy, and they have no idea of what he had done, or how far he has got with the work he was doing other than at a pretty basic level.

OK, we will survive – but it is not the best way of working. It’s just another example of bad practice, and when you are paying about $1500 a day, I think that you are entitled to expect a certain level of professionalism and I am not convinced that we’ve seen that from some of the people that we have had working for us on our project.
Having said all that, I would understand if anyone then turned the criticism back on us. The systems are ours, and it would not be unreasonable for someone outside of the company to suggest that it is our responsibility to maintain records of what work is done. As it happens, we do keep some records for various reasons and we can point to a number of audit trails that show we are attempting to maintain a level of control.

The problem is of course that in many ways, the SI and the consultants working for them were working in the way that they want to, rather than in a way that matched what we want or need. I suspect that for most of the consultants concerned, this is the same way that they have worked on all of their projects, and they know no different. Our project leader should have forced the issue (and he freely admits that) but he was taking advice from the SI on how the project should run. But we will probably never know all of the configuration that has been done.

Well it’s too late now – just got to keep going as we are.

No change here...

2011-05-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

It’s been about a month since my last post – and there’s a simple reason for that. I’ve been really busy on other projects, not related to SAP. I’m not the only either – several other departments have also been catching up on various things that have been delayed.

We started the SAP implementation about 4 years ago. At times it seems astonishing how quickly the time has passed, at other times it seems that we have been working on it for ever. The problem is that during that time, so much effort has gone into the project, that many other jobs have been postponed. In a couple of cases, this has not been a good thing – we needed to get on and get them done so it was decided that we would do exactly that.

For IT, there have been a couple of hardware refresh jobs, replacing workstations, printers and a Xerox machine. We’ve also been testing a couple of tablets that we think might be of value to the sales force. There have been couple of jobs done within some of the offices to make more efficient use of the space available, so we were also getting involved in the cable work. As you can see, this has meant that there hasn’t been a lot of time left to do more than basic work on SAP.

After the last visit to our overseas site, everyone felt that we had gotten thru a lot of the outstanding work and had almost caught up so that we would be back on schedule. When we left, the point was made that they needed to get on with the data preparation so that it could be loaded. We had done some loading of a few basic data items into the Development system, but not all of the data, and literally only a few items in each category. A decision was made that we would load no more into the Dev system and just go straight thru to the QAS system.

I was a bit concerned about this, as I felt that the actual loading wouldn’t really take up that much time, and felt that it would make sense to try to get all of the data sorted and proven. However, I could see that we need to keep on schedule – I’m not happy about cutting corners, but I can probably live with this.

However, when the data arrived, it quickly became clear that it was simply no good. Not one of the data loading batch jobs was able to complete successfully, and most were so poor that we were looking at maybe 10-20% had gone in successfully on each batch. It was so bad that the project leader took another trip over there to talk to them again. When he arrived back, he was really pissed – he went back over the requirements with their people but feels that they still don’t quite yet get it.
I haven’t been asked if I would go over again, but I know that there have been discussions, and I get the feeling that they are expecting me to offer to go there in the next couple of weeks. As it happens, there is work that I was planning to do, but I’m not sure I will have time to do both jobs, the planned work and talking with them about the data preparation and cleansing.

There is no question that it is essential we get the data right. We found this out ourselves when it was our turn. We have made the point to the people at the overseas site, and several people discussed it with them, making the points very clearly. We provided some sample files showing how it should be done, highlighting the main pitfalls – but none of this seems to have made the slightest difference, and they are now well over a month behind where they should be, and falling further behind each day.

No-one has said anything, but I’m now a bit concerned that they will cut back on the testing in the QAS system before we go live. I’m also a bit worried that staff over there won’t get the full amount of training before their cutover. For me, it would make sense to push the go-live out again, and make sure that things are done right. But it seems that there is something going on in the background, and they don’t seem too keen to discuss any further delays.

Well, we’ll probably know a bit more in a couple of weeks’ time.

What a difference a day makes...

2011-05-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

Or even a week…

Our project leader has been over to our overseas site a number of times so far this year, about once every 3 weeks or so - and altho he has said in the board meetings that things were going well, it was clear that there was a bit more hope than confidence in what he was saying.

Privately, he has been suggesting to the project team leaders that there are still far too many issues unresolved, and that despite quite a lot of hard work, we don’t seem to be progressing as fast as we should be. Although he wouldn’t actually say we were behind schedule, it’s pretty clear that the proposed go live date was looking increasingly hard to meet.

I’ve suggested a number of times that we should get the staff from our overseas site to visit with us for a week so that we can help them out with training and testing – by getting them to work with our staff I hoped that they would pick up some of the required knowledge. But altho it was seen to be a good idea, we have had none of their staff visit with us since last August.

It was then suggested about a month ago that we should arrange for our project team to go over there instead. Plans were made, travel and hotels booked and the project leader set out a plan for the week. This was primarily to test their processes to make sure that these would work – I felt that this would be a good start, but was concerned that we would miss a good opportunity to ensure that their staff was adequately trained.

I’d also gotten a bit worried about some of the comments from our project team – one or two had said to me that they were not really sure what they were supposed to be doing over there. So I made a point of spending some time with each one, to discuss how to test the various processes, and I set-up a series of test user accounts for them and made sure that they knew what they had to do.

On the first day at the site, we weren’t able to get much done – we arrived late in the day, and really only just managed to introduce ourselves to people, and get things organised so that we could start work properly the following day. But after that, things really started to take off.

The project team made a point of getting the key staff in with them so that they could see the processes, and in most cases after a couple of demos, these people were carrying out many of the actual tests. That second day, we had actually gone thru every single process and tested at least 3 variants for each. Their staff are now far more confident in the way that they use SAP, and altho they still have more work to do, based upon what they did last week, they should be ready for the go-live.

It should be said that during the tests, we did actually find several key issues – but about half of these I was able to correct almost immediately. As one of their consultants was on site, the rest were passed to him and it has to be said, he made a good start on getting them corrected. However, he also made contact with a couple of the other consultants and they were then available on the third and fourth days.

In fact, by the last day, we had not only gone thru every process many times and confirmed all were working, most of the outstanding issues had also been addressed. This included several that have been on the list for months. It also highlighted a couple of issues with data – I had tried to highlight this previously, and now it is obviously the most urgent major problem remaining so they are looking at dealing with this next.

It should be said that it was hard work - most of the guys were suffering with jet lag, and one had an upset stomach. It's also been a bit warmer there than we normally face this time of year, and some had difficulty sleeping at night. Despite these problems, everyone was really pleased - and I have to say that it is very clear that we have made a major leap forward.

We still have a lot of work to do, but we are almost back on schedule to go live in a couple of moths time. If we can get the data done on time next, then it should be possible to start the next stage of testing in the test system before the end of the month - and if it there are no major problems, we will be back on track.

It helps that there are not that many staff at that site and that they don't have to learn all of the various processes. But there is a lot more confidence now, both on site and in the project team. It has been said that it may be necessary to organise another trip over, and if we do, I'm sure that it will prove to be as valuable an exercise as this one was.

Learning the hard way

2011-04-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

I got back late last night from our overseas site. The project lead and I made a trip over to check on how things were going, and to make arrangements for some later work.

The first issue was the cleansing and preparation of data. When we first did this for the initial project, we found that there were some key issues - getting the actual data extracted into a format that people could use, then getting the relevant departments to tackle the job of cleaning the data out so that we would have only good stuff to load.

We'd found that this was a lot harder than we had anticipated. Some of the data extracts from the legacy system were OK, but there were many areas where the different aspects of the data were not together in the old database, so it required some careful work and a lot of double checking in order to assemble the separate bits of data together. We made this point very clearly to the people at the new site - and gave them what we thought would be the right tools to help them.

Unfortunately, the extract has again taken a lot longer than we expected. In this case, they are dealing with an outside company on a system that we know little about, and the actual data only started coming thru about 4-5 weeks ago. They have been checking the data, but there is still a lot to do - the first couple of tests showed that they are not even close to having it ready for the full data load process which is supposed to start in 1 weeks time.

I'm not involved in it this time - one of my staff is doing the data load and I have virtually lost him for the next month whilst he processes the data. He is really confident and I'm sure that he will do it right - but I know from the work that he has done previously, that it will take more than just the next month to finish. He gets bored with things very easily and moves on to new stuff before finishing a job - I have to monitor him all the time and keeping reining him back in to make sure that he stays on track.

There is another concern as well - and it relates to the knowledge transfer process. I think that the big problem here is that several of the staff are still thinking in terms of how they do the various processes within their existing system. They then have got the consultants to show them how that specific process is done in SAP - and that is not the best way to approach learning the product.

When we first started, I read in several books that it was important to understand that implementing SAP is very different to many other products. To begin with, I probably didn't really see why that should be the case, but having spent a while working with it now, I can see that point that these people were trying to make. It's necessary to learn how to do it the "SAP way" and almost forget how things used to be done (yes, there may be exceptions).

I'd made that point on my previous visits to the site, but I don't think that they really understood what I was trying to tell them. As a result, they are still thinking on how the process was done in the legacy sysem, and then try to remember how that process is then done with SAP. I know that it is still early days, but I don't think that there is a single person yet that can actually complete a single process on their own, even if they are using the training material that they have.

I did speak to the project lead about this, but he doesn't seem to be too worried. His view is that they will pick up speed and they will all be ready by the time of their go-live. I'm not so sure - I don't think that they have had sufficient hands on experience with the consultants, and I'm convinced that whilst they may have seen a given process, they don't fully know any of them.

Unfortunately, our project lead has been working with SAP now every day for several years, and I get the feeling that he expects everyone else to know as much about it as he does. Even tho he has watched them and seen just how slow and uncertain they are, he is convinced that they will improve in a very short time. For me, I am a bit concerned that they won't keep up their practisng if we are not staying on top of them.

And that of course is going to be a big thing. We will of course provide some support for them, but it's going to be a bit difficult - certainly not as easy as when you are on a single site, or even a few hundred miles apart as long as you speak the same language. It will be much better for everyone if they are more confident in using the system before they go live.

I've also been told that it is absolutely essential they go live no later than the last week of July. It won't be possible for them to continue working with their legacy system after then. I did think about suggesting perhaps we should consider a backup plan in case we can't get the data load, and testing finshed by then, but it was pretty clear that this would not have a been a welcome suggestion.

I get the feeling that our project team are going to be earning a lot of frequent flyer miles!

...And yet another.

2011-04-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

When we first started creating the roles for users, I took the advice of the consultants - but after a short while, realised that it was going to get a bit more complicated than I had originally expected. For that reason, I changed the names of the roles, using Z1 for those at our first site, Z2 at the second, Z3 at the third.

The reason for this was that we actually needed to define some limits to what people on each site would be able to do. We didn't want the staff at our second site to have the oppotunity to make changes to items from the main site. This seemed to work quite well, but then I found that some roles were getting very big - and at that point, I started to split the roles down.

We had a hierarchy - sales clerk, sales manager and added a couple of other items to this to allow some staff more access to do certain functions. So for example, 2 staff are involved in contract review, so we have a role for that. 2 other staff are involved in dealing with certain groups of customers, and that is a seperate role as well.

There were some issues right from the beginning, as the project team didn't really understand the concept of permissions - I would regularly be asked to give someone access to something, and when I pointed out that it was to the role that permission was granted, they would get very frustrated. However, it appears that for the most part, they now do understand and we do have a set of roles that serve our needs.

When we started on our first overseas site, I copied the basic roles from our second site, changed the organisational levels and applied user accounts to get them started as Z4. I felt that as we had most of the authorisations already confirmed, this would be pretty much what was needed. I sent details through to the relevant people, including the consultants that I had been told would be doing the necessary work, and waited for some minor changes.

Up until the first day of the work to go thru the processes with the staff, I had heard nothing. Later in the day, I received an email from a completely new consultant asking me to give permission for the staff member to have access to certain t-codes. When I checked, about 80% of those were already in the relevant role, and the member of staff had been added to the role. The few remaining were t-codes that we didn't actually use - we used different ones to do the same job.

I had several more emails requesting access, each time on the day of the process testing rather that before hand. In several cases, I pointed out that the t-codes being requested were restricted to certain people. It was decided that currency rates, period closure etc would be done centrally, rather than have different people at each site getting involved. However, I was also asked to provide access to certain t-codes that I was very reluctant to hand over - why would the staff members need access to things such as SCC4, STMS, SE16N just to name a couple. These are only for administrative positions, and I could see lots of issues if they had access to these.

What I didn't know was that the staff at our overseas site had made a complaint that they didn't feel that they were getting the relevant training they needed and this was passed to our CEO. He then discussed this with the director of the SI, who basically said that I was holding up the work by not providing the required access.

I was dragged into the CEO's office, and to be brief, he told me that the SI were insisting that I give all of the staff at our overseas site the profile SAP_ALL. I tried to point out that this was not good practice etc. but this cut no ice. I highlighted that we needed to get the roles right, but he had been told that this could be done afterwards - in order to get the site up and running as soon as possible, they needed SAP_ALL.

At that point, I told him that if he wanted this, I required him to put it in writing - and I thought that he was going to explode. I won't go into the discussion because it's not necessary, but it was very unpleasant. However, I did get the instruction in writing as I requested.

Someone has subsequently said that he thinks that's a good thing - that when things go wrong, I can produce the written instruction, and throw it back at him. That's not why I did this - when it goes wrong, I will not bother arguing, I'll just get on and try to resolve the problem. My reason for asking for the instruction to be in writing, was to make sure that he understood just how seriously I take the issue.

As it happens, the process testing over at the other site is way behind. They still have almost all of the work to go thru still, and based upon the last project plan, we are about a month behind. There is going to be a big push in a couple of weeks and I have done some work to allow some of our people to do some testing for them. However, I'm not convinced that this will be of any value, as it it appears the consultants are teaching the staff over there different processes to what our people worked on.

I have reason to believe that the SI are pushing to get our overseas site operational on the agreed date, no matter if they are ready or not. I think that this is potentially a serious error of judgement - if they are not ready, we should admit that, and hold off until they are ready. Pushing for them to go live without them being ready could be disastrous - and not just for them, but for the company as a whole.

...and another?

2011-03-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

As anyone that works with SAP will know, it is normally set-up as a 3 system landscape. So you have one system which is for development work, one system for testing purposes and another system which is the actual production server - the one that is used by the organization for the day to day work.

The reason behind this is really quite sensible - when you have an ERP system, it is usually really quite important that the production system continues to operate without interruption. Making changes can have pretty serious consequences - you don't want to make a change and then find that it causes the system to fall over everytime someone enters a piece of data (and most people have had experience of exactly that happening).

So having the 3 systems allows you to do development work on one system which won't generally affect anyone else, plus you can then test out the changes on the second system to make sure that there are no undesirable side affects. Once this is fully tested, the changes can be applied to the production system and this will reduce the likelihood of the changes creating an issue that will stop the main system from running as it should.

When we started out, the consultants did actually explain this - however, our project team members didn't really latch onto the concept. Even some considerable time later, they still didn't really fully grasp the purpose of the 3 system landscape. In fact, I would suggest that most of them thought the idea was we would start with the development system, then at some point we would move to the test system, but that that meant the development system was then no longer needed. The same would then happen to move to the production system, at which point the test system would become redundant. They just couldn't see why the others were needed once we had moved to the production system.

Unfortunately, we have had a problem with this - the consultants from the SI and our project leader regularly perform development work in the production system. In some cases, it is just a variant to a report - but on a number of occasions, it has been a bit more than that. There are many times that I've seen our project leader working on producing a new report or even a Z t-code. I can't tell you how many times I have had an email asking me to add a new t-code to a role, only to find that it doesn't exist in the master system.

Now I have raised this issue (more than a few times), but the problem is that every time, he will simply say that he is just following the same procedure as the people from the SI. I can't dispute that - it's exactly what they do. The fact that they shouldn't doesn't come into the argument. It's difficult to say that he shouldn't do it, when the people that we are paying a great deal of money to, ignore some of the most basic practices. And of course, if the project leader (who is a senior manager) doesn't follow the correct procedure, then it's a bit difficult to get other people to do it the way that it should be done. "Monkey see, monkey do".

What I have found a bit irritating is that the project leader does actually understand the reason behind this, and he fully supports my attempts to get people to use the appropriate system. (However, that doesn't apply to him of course!) There was an incident about 2 months ago, and he was bouncing off the walls about the fact that someone was doing what they shouldn't - but he ignored the fact that he had been doing the same thing just a couple of days before. He just couldn't see that people will do as he does, rather than as he says they should.

I remember reading something a few years ago - it's essential to train people up in the way that you want them to work, right from the beginning. There is no point in training people to do things one way, then try to get them to change later as it seldom works out the way that you want. I have to say, we have proven the value of that - I doubt very much that we will ever be able to get people to change their way of working now. I suspect that even if we have a major disaster, they will still carry on in exactly the same way after it has all been sorted out.

But it doesn't mean that it's right - or that we should tolerate it. This slackness leads on to other problems - but more of that another time.

(I've just noticed that there was an issue with the paragraphs on the original post - I've now corrected that. Sorry to anyone that was frightened off by a mass of text!)

Please sir, may I have another?

2011-03-08T13:03:00.000-08:00

I've been off work for just over a week - I've not been as ill as that for some time. However, I started feeling better at the weekend, and went back into work Monday.

I went thru various things with my staff, made sure that there were no major issues that needed immediate work, the usual sort of stuff. A bit later in the day, I went in to talk to our SAP project leader and catch up on any developments.

We have a new timetable in place for our overseas site project and the go-live date has already been moved several times. Despite that, they are still behind schedule, and falling behind further every week. He was getting concerned so decided to go there last week and he spent a few days on site.

Now as I have said previously, we have had a number of changes of consultant over there. I'm told that the SI didn't have the personnel available to do the work, so they bought in a couple of people who don't work for them. As far as I can tell, these people were quite experienced (8-10 years) with a number of implementations to their credit. However, these people are now gone and have been replaced by two people that do work for the SI. The first guy has about 2 months experience and this is his first implementation. The second is a young lady with slightly more experience - she has just under 6 months with SAP and this will be her second project.

Our project leader went over to the first guy and saw he had a copy of the blueprint document open, and was in the middle of makings some config changes. He was a bit surprised as he had been told that these were all done. However, when he looked a bit harder at the document, it was version 4 - and the final version which was supposed to be the one we are working with is version 7.

Essentially, a bunch of config changes were made ages ago, then changed to update them to meet the required blueprint. The consultant was in the process of changing them all back to the earlier version (which had already been changed before). Our project leader naturally asked him if there had been any conversation on handing over the project from the previous consultant and was met with a blank look. You can bet he made it very clear that the guy was going to have to get it changed back again real quick!

So feeling a bit frustrated he went over to one of the site staff to ask a few questions. To his horror, the guy was in IMG and was busy making config changes of his own. His immediate reaction was to call me on the cell phone to give me a chewing out for letting the guy have access to this - then he thought he would check to see how the guy was logged on. To his astonishment, the staff member was logged on using one of the consultants logon and password. When he queried how this happened, the guy just showed him a sticky note with the details hand written on it.

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I am sure that some of you are equally astounded - you may even be shouting. When the project leader told me this, I just closed my eyes and thought of my wife and I on a nice, warm, sunny beach, with a couple of cool long drinks. Hmmmm!

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For what it's worth, the member of staff has had 2 (count them) days of training. The consultant concerned has obviously been on some SAP course, and she is using the same training material to do the training of staff on our site. When asked if it was appropriate for staff to know some of these items, she just shrugged - she clearly thought that this was how it was done.

So rather than train our people in what they have to do to do their jobs, she has tried to show them stuff that they will never actually get involved in. The things that they will need to know, she doesn't appear to have covered at all. This has caused some confusion and I now understand why I got a rather frantic email from the finance guy on the site demanding access to the entire SAP accounts menu. (About 4,000 transactions?)

Anyways, the project leader is back, he is not happy, and he wants to have a meeting with all of the project team. He is basically going to say that each one of them is going to have to do a trip over there to do some of the site training. I raised this option about a year ago, and the response was considerably less than enthusiastic. Now they will have no choice - and that will cause some bad feeling.

There were other things that I wanted to cover, but they can wait for another time.

Same old, same old

2011-02-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Foreign parts

2011-01-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

From the very beginning of our ERP selection and implementation project, it was thought that we should choose a product that could be used by all of our sites, including those overseas. The reasons for this are that with one system, we should be able to improve processes, make costs more transparent and improve the communication, analysis and decison making for the whole group. This simply makes so much sense, that it would be difficult to justify any other course of action.

At the time, every single site was using a different system, with different processes, and it was not easy to tie all the data together, as much of it was in different formats. Once the decision had been made to go with SAP, it was made very clear that the sites in the home country would be done first, then the product would be rolled out across the rest of the sites in other countries.

The project was kicked off back in 2007 and the go live was planned for the second half of 2008. It was suggested by the System Integrator that we would then be able to get the first site overseas done in the first quarter of 2009, then another about 6-8 months later, and the sites in other countries at approx the same interval. However, due to a number of other outside concerns, a decision was made that the third site was put back to just over a year after the second site, and then the others were to follow on again at 6 month intervals.

As you'll be aware if you've followed my previous posts, the initial go-live was put back, first by a month, then again and again until a date 14 months after the original planned date. Of course, as we hadn't gone live, it was impossible for the second site to do so. Their date was also delayed and a tentative date of second quarter 2010 was agreed. But as so much work was being done on the main project, none was being done for them. It later turned out that of the little work that had been done, none was really of any use, so in the end, they had to start from scratch.

There was a meeting just under a year ago between the director of the SI firm, our CEO, our project lead and the VP from the site for that country. I wasn't involved and didn't get very much information about what was agreed - I do know that the director from the consultancy sent an email with his take on what was agreed, and it was just 4 bullet points! I was told that he would supply a project plan for the implementation at that site, and that they would be going live on a date just after the middle of the year.

I made myself a little unpopular at that point - I pointed out that the date that he had indicated was actually during a period when the majority of the staff at that site would be away. They have a number of national holidays and various events, and to set a date for a go-live then would have been pretty darn silly. As it happens, once the VP concerned got his copy of the email, he made exactly the same comments. It appeared he had made that very point during the meeting, but it seems that this had been ignored. It took a while but a new project plan was eventually drawn up, this time with a more sensible date, and this was distributed.

So the new plan was that this second phase would see the site go-live at the end of October 2010. I had a few reservations about that, as I knew that there was a lot of work to be done, and altho the site is smaller, and there would have been slightly less work, as they have fewer staff to spare to do the tasks, it seemed that the plans were optimistic at best. This was not made any easier by our internal project team. Most of them were not that willing to spend as much time working on the project for another site as they were for their own site.

I spent a few days at different stages over there, and I tried to keep in contact with their people. It became obvious that they were falling behind very badly almost from the get go. I tried to see what I could do to help, but it just seemed that as we had experienced with the project for the main site, nothing seemed to stay on schedule. There was little communication, and we had to try to get information for ourselves on the progress.

There was a meeting organised last September - the director for the SI apparently made a statement that we were on schedule and the site would be ready to go live on the date agreed in October. When I heard this, I couldn't believe it - I went into the CEO and told him quite bluntly that this was garbage and showed just how little work had been done. There were some very tense audio conference meetings at which I was accused of being an "Organizational Terrorist" by the consultants. (I'm not quite sure what they meant by it, but it was obviously not intended to be complimentary.)

As it happens, it became abundantly clear that the second site is not ready (and they still aren't). The consultants working on that site were still making config changes right thru to Christmas, and none of these have yet been transported. No data has been extracted from their old systems, so of course it hasn't been loaded. None of their staff have yet had a single training sesson - and as a result not one piece of testing has been carried out. The consultants were complaining that the language packs had not been applied as there were several errors. We have since identified that in fact all of these are in place and working - the missing text is all stuff that they would have to add manually.

At this stage, I don't think that we have a date for the go-live at the second site. Someone did suggest May this year, but I can't see that happening due to the amount still to be done. We are then almost into their main summer holiday period, plus the national holidays again, so I have a feeling that we could in fact be looking at September or October of this year before they will be ready. In other words, they will be going live about a year after the date set for them as part of the revised project.

Now I have been trying to understand why these dates are so clearly out of sync with the project plan, and I feel that I have something to add. I'm sure that what is happening is that the consultancy are using a generic plan that says, X many days for step 1, Y many days for step 2 and so on. This is fine if the allocated amount makes sense and also if they then actually communicate that information so everyone knows what is required.

I am going to say that I don't believe that any meaningful communication is taking place. The reason that I say this is the consultants doing the work didn't seem to know about the stages and had no idea of when anything was supposed to be completed by. But for me the biggest issue is that it appears the director of the consultants is not even checking to see if the work has been done. His plan says that stage 4 should be complete on day 71, this is day 72 so stage 4 is now complete. If it isn't, he just ignores it and carries on to stage 5.

I'm sure that for some people, this makes sense - but I really cannot see it. If the work is not complete, it is not complete. I accept that if you have a fixed date on a project, sometimes you have to make a decision to trim the workload to make sure that you achieve that fixed date. But in this case, trimming the workload is not an option as that means the product won't work - and it then makes sense to make sure the work is complete even if the date has to slip.

So I suspect that I'm going to be doing some travelling later this year - going to have to dig out my old language tapes to brush up!

Looking forward

2010-12-30T13:39:00.000-08:00

I hope that everyone has had a good Christmas holiday and is looking forward to the new year with anticipation. We have a family get together planned to see in the new year - my wife is just starting to get the food arranged, so I am banished to the den. As it is the end of another year, I thought that I would look back to analyze what has been happening, and I also decided that I would try to be more upbeat than usual.

So... lets start by looking at the actual systems. This is very definitely a positive point as our servers are running (for the most part) pretty smoothly and we only get a few issues from time to time. When we do get an issue, it is generally down to someone doing something that they have been told NOT to do - run a report without filling in any filtering information so the program tries to run the sales data on every single item that we have in the catalogue for every single customer. I'm sure that you will know the problem!

For many people this will sound stupid - after all, you would expect a system to run well, or why would you want to use it? However, I know from talking to many other users that we seem to be doing better than a lot of other businesses in terms of system operation, even tho' we are still quite new to SAP.

We are also managing to stay on top of the database admin work, software updates, system monitoring, and still do the rest of the normal IT work, even tho' we have no more extra staff than before. Again, I have heard stories from other companies that indicate they allocated a significant increase in manpower in order to maintain a level of service, and we have been able to avoid that so far. This all means that we are able to maintain our budget levels, and that has been noted by the senior managers.

Partly that has been due to training - we have spent some time to get all of the IT staff (including myself) along to an SAP training center. This has proven to be money well spent in many areas, and I am really keen to see this rolled out amongst the rest of the project team. Just before Christmas, I spoke to the CEO about a particular organization - I was able to tell him how much they have spent in a particular area that we have handled internally, and to estimate just how much we have saved as a result. In dollar terms, it's about $400,000 over the last 2 years which has to be good news. He is not entirely convinced about the training yet, but he has given the green light to a couple of others to do some training and if that goes well, I'm sure that he will then authorize more.

Throughout the business, we can see that most people (not all yet sadly) are getting quite proficient at using SAP. Certainly in each department, we are seeing most staff can complete most processes with relative ease. It has to be said that there are still issues with about 20% of the various processes, and these (naturally) seem to be the biggest stumbling blocks and generate more work than they save. We are using the key staff to try to make sure that others are trained appropriately - we have tried to start some "refresher" style training sessions using these key people. Time will tell if this works or not.

There is unfortunately still an issue with data output - we are still not where we would want to be. However, we are starting to get some valid data at last, and this is being used to correct some of the initial input which we always knew was poor at best. For example, we are now seeing some more accurate figures on production costs, so that is being fed back into the systems, and hopefully, we will see this improve the way that we start to price goods up. It has taken a lot longer than anticipated, and some of the figures are still questionable, but it is what we hoped we would eventually be able to see.

We successfully completed a secondary project to use document management within SAP at the beginning of the year - as I have indicated before, this has been a truly useful change and has been instrumental in encouraging some people to look at the program in a more positive light. This has also lead to a couple of other small projects associated to SAP. We have reduced the amount of printing that is required by about 20% - not a huge saving in the overall scheme of things, but something positive to point to. We are producing bar code labels for products that have customer codes on them as well as ours, and we are currently evaluating making use of scanning more widely as part of our internal processes.

So we would have to say that our SAP implementation has been successful. Certainly, there are many other organizations that have had a far worse time than us and are still struggling with their systems. Of course, there is still much to be done and considerable effort required to ensure that the ERP does deliver what was always hoped for. But with what we have achieved so far, and what has been learned, I am sure that we can continue to build upon that success.

Now at this stage, I should say that I am not an SAP convert - we have spent so much, the project has taken so long that I'm still not entirely sure that we will ever see an ROI. In addition I am going to say again that much of the success of our project is down to the hard work of our internal project team. Without their effort, skill, commitment and knowledge of the business, I seriously doubt that we would have ever gone live successfully.

But we have gone live, and it has been fairly successful and there is evidence that we can continue in this way. So tomorrow night, I will definitely raise a glass to the guys and gals that have worked so hard and wish them all the best for 2011.

I also wish the same to everyone that reads this blog - and may the new year bring happiness, health and prosperity to you all.

What price training?

2010-12-11T03:20:00.000-08:00

I've been back to work for a few weeks, but have been a bit busy on a couple of non-SAP related projects. But as they are progressing well, I thought that I would return to an issue that has been bugging me (and others) for a while.

One of the most consistent comments from the project team and to a lesser extent from the end users, relates to the training that they receive in how to use SAP. Within the wider scope of a project, this is referred to as "knowledge transfer" and is seen as a key requirement for a successful project. In fact, this was identified as a major item right back at the beginning of the company plans to implement a new ERP system, even before the decision was made to install SAP.

The feeling is quite clear amongst the project team that overall, the level of knowledge transfer that has taken place is not what we would have wanted. Certainly, there were a few sessions where a couple of the consultants working on the project sat down with the various people and went thru the processes - but almost from the beginning, comments were made that far too often, these seemed to be very high level overviews rather than explanations of how to complete a specific process.

As a result of this, many of the various processes were never really tested properly or fully in the early stages. In fact, it can be identified that the real testing only took place finally about 3 months before we went live. Until that point, there may have been some limited testing such as placing a purchase order, but no-one would then use that data to conduct a goods receipt and warehousing process for example.

As is regularly stated, SAP is very integrated - making an entry in one module will have an affect in others, so it is vital to make sure that the linked processes are functioning correctly by a series of end to end tests. In order to carry out this testing work effectively, it is essential that people know how to complete the full process from a very early stage, but it seemed that at best, people were shown just limited steps within part of a process and often these were very generic items that in themselves did little to fully test anything.

In the end, we were pretty much left to our own devices to draw up a training plan, to put together the required material, and conduct end user training. A considerable effort was put in by my colleagues to make sure that their staff knew what as required and how they would be doing their jobs in future. Unfortunately, sometimes this was then invalidated by changes made by the consultants - they would do some configuration change, not actually test anything, and the first anyone would know was when someone was trying out a process that had previously worked, only to find that it suddenly didn't.

This happened a lot - far more than I would have liked. I won't say that it was a daily occurence, but certainly weekly for about 5-6 months (sometimes even 2-3 times in a week) before we went live. As you can imagine, this was immensely frustrating and caused considerable delays, perhaps unnecessarily - altho I am sure that there are those who will say that this is just part of a development process.

The reason that I highlight this is that we have had another issue recently. Suddenly, a process that has worked perfectly for almost a full year, now doesn't. A member of the finance team was left in tears because she was being blamed for not doing her work correctly - a job that she has been able to do completely satisfactorily every month for 11 months, she is now unable to do at all. It took a while to identify the cause, and it is due to a consultant working on something, making a change that he hasn't checked, but pushed thru to the Production system.

The modification is required - in fact it was required before we went live, but the consultants that are still on site have only just started to look at this specific item. Essentially, the config change means that a process has been changed slightly, and now we need to re-train other staff in sales support. They have to change the way that they work and do their process to meet the new requirements, so that this will go thru to the other areas, so that the finance people can then do their work. But of course, no-one has said a thing, none of the project team were aware of the change made, and no testing or training has taken place.

I raise this issue because I have made a point of getting my own staff in IT off to an SAP training center over the last year. We have completed a number of courses between us, and the cost in total has been just under $18,000, even with some travel, accomodation and meals - and that's still less than 12 days consultancy fees. Which is the better value? As far as I am concerned, we learnt far more at the training center and it was better organised, so for me it is pretty clear. It also has to be said that following the SAP training, we actually now know what we are supposed to be doing, which is more than could be said for the training we received from the consultants.

I've suggested many times, that it would make sense to get some of our project team off on some of these courses - possibly even some of the non-project team super users. I recently identified a series of 4 courses that would be of real value in a particular area of the business. The cost would be just under 5 days consultancy and I am fairly confident that the person I suggested for the courses would be able to pick up exactly what would be needed to get the best value from the courses and to ensure that he would be able then to pass that knowledge on to others.

Instead, the director from the SI firm has arranged with our CEO and internal project lead to have another one of his consultants come to site for 10 days to look at this specific module, get it set up and train the staff. As this is a guy that we have had on site many times before, we know what his area of expertise is - and it isn't this particular module. We know what capabilities he has in training and to be blunt they are pretty awful - several staff have stated privately that they don't like the guy as they consider him to be arrogant and offensive and there are female staff that really don't want to be part of the training if he is running it.

It also has to be said that he considers himself to be a jim dandy ABAP developer. I don't know sufficient about ABAP myself to measure his skill in that code, but I have worked with other codes and in software development, and I can say with some assurance that he just is not that good at doing program coding in a structured and managed way. He has taken it upon himself to make more than a few changes to code that have caused issues and it seems to take quite some time to get corrections to these problems.

It seems so odd to me - that senior management are willing to pay a substantial fee to a firm that have not exactly shown themselves in the best light, for a consultant that seems to cause more problems than he resolves. All this to work on an area that our own staff might well be able to do once they have had the right training, and which training will cost less than the consultancy fee.

It does seem that the senior managers have a blind spot in this - they value an external consultant in a suit higher than their own staff, even when the evidence doesn't seem to support their belief. I just find it so frustrating.

Qualifications

2010-11-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be taking a short vacation - my wife's sister has been unwell, so we will be visiting with them for a short while. However, I want to leave you with a few thoughts.

Now I accept that I have only done the one implementation project - I have however, spoken to half a dozen people that have also been involved in completely separate projects. Based on the information from these, I am going to highlight a few issues that seem to be common between these.

In the cases involved, the projects all overran by a considerable amount - they also cost a significant amount more than was originally budgeted. Another common complaint was that there were many more days consultancy involved than had been advised and everyone highlighted issues with the quality of the consultants involved, the knowledge transfer that took place (or didn't!) and problems with getting the right advice for the business concerned.

Now I have slowly come to see that actually the software does do what it needs to (for the most part). I still think that it looks outdated, some of the processes are very cumbersome, and there are a number of technical items that seem to be designed by people specifically to ensure that they will always been needed. But there is no question that it can be made to do what is needed by many organizations, and if done correctly, will actually achieve what it was designed for - to help a business manage itself better.

The problem is that when an issue occurs, it is always "Darn SAP" (or worse). People are not able to distinguish between the software product, the company and the System Integrator employees (and why should they?).

Taking a slightly higher level view, I could say that it could be down to the implementation process. But if you look at the methodology, it should work (and I am assured that it does by many more experienced people than myself). It meets the needs of the project if carried out. But there I would say is a key problem - from my own experience, I know that the SI director constantly used that SAP image with the project roadmap used in many books to prove that they work to the SAP methodology. But just using the image is not the same as actually following the full procedure.

It could of course be down to the individual consultants. We were promised experienced people with key skills, but instead got people that proved to be relatively new to the SAP world. In many cases, they had received SAP training, but it was in modules that they then didn't work on - and as a result, we have found many areas where we were given poor advice, and are now having to consider re-doing several major sections of the project again.

In a recent coversation with our senior finance officer, she made the comment that one consultant had been on site, then was called back in to do the job that he should have done the first time but didn't - and was then called back a third time to fix the problems that he created the second time! What really annoyed her was the cost - we know that he won't get what we have paid the SI, just a part of that, but even if he only gets half of what was paid, he will actually recive more money this year from us, than any of the senior management team below the C level.

Now all of this is creating serious PR issues for SAP. To be blunt, if we had that sort of major perception problem with our customers, we would have had shareholders screaming for heads to roll. Somehow though, SAP seem to get around this. But the question then is for how much longer can this situation remain unchanged? Surely SAP need to take a long hard look at the people that are representing them and ensure that these people are doing the right kind of job in order to preserve a reputation just like everyone else?

Now at this point, I think it fair to mention that a while ago, a couple of long time readers (Jon Reed and Denis Howlett) along with a couple of other guys set out to take a critical look at just this topic. They produced a document that I have now had the chance to read and made a number of key suggestions that they felt would be to everyone's benefit. I'm adding link below as I think everyone should take the time to read it.
(http://www.jonerp.com/pdf/sap_certification_from_cert5.pdf)

Now you can read what you like into what they say - personally, I think they make a lot of sense. Can you imagine McDonalds operating the way that SAP seem to? The reason that McDonalds are so successful is that they have a key set of operations and every one of their restaurants has to follow them - if a franchisee chooses to ignore these, he may well find that the franchise is taken away from him. They go to great lengths to ensure that the correct training is carried out, that staff work to the defined standards and that is "policed" by careful observation from "mystery shoppers".

From what I've seen, most SAP SIs are rewarded not for the work that they do, but just on how much money they generate. It's therefore in their interest to ensure that costs are kept down, so they engage less well experienced staff. They don't worry about doing a good job - after all, they will earn more by doing a crappy job and getting called back in again and again.

Perhaps SAP could take a look at the McDonalds method - perhaps they need to police their SIs more carefully. These people are representing SAP, and if I was an SAP shareholder, I would want to make darn sure that they did so in a way that I found acceptable.

SAP have training academies, run both by themselves and by others - is there a difference in the quality of the teaching? I can't say for certain, but I suspect from what I have seen that this is a possibility. Having taken a certification, is there a need to refresh it? There have been a lot of changes in various processes in the last few yers, and I know that the guys we had working with us were not aware of many of these. Perhaps SAP should declare a "life" to a cert - say 5 years? After that, the consultant would have to retake the exam to prove that they have stayed up to date.

Certainly from what I have seen, I would question the value of some of the certs. Back in the 90s, people were highly critical of "paper MCSEs" - Microsoft certifications that were obtained without real knowledge, just a series of brain dumps. These days, it is almost impossible to pass an MS exam without real handson experience - they heard the complaints and have done something about it. Can anyone say the same about an SAP cert?

I would say tho' that I don't have too much confidence in seeing any changes any time soon. I do wonder if SAP have reached the point where they are so big that they think they will just carry on the way they are without having to worry about standards. Oh well, time will tell.

See you again in a couple of weeks.

Irritation with invoices

2010-10-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

It's been real busy the last few weeks - we've had some issues with invoicing. But to really understand the problems, and to put it in context, I need to go back to the early days.

When we were starting out, almost everyone seemed to either know someone or had talked to someone that had a story about SAP and invoicing. I got talking to a copier salesman who told me that his company had implemented SAP and were unable to invoice anyone for about 9 months after their go live. From what he said, it seemed the business almost went bust - and they were a multi billion dollar outfit. This did cause some concerns, and so we wanted to make sure that this sort of thing wouldn't happen to us.

Right back at the beginning, we gave the system integrators a copy of the paperwork we needed to generate - I'm not sure, but I think it was within the first two weeks. This included the invoice and we made it very clear what actual information needed to be on it. We weren't too bothered about the specific layout, orientation, fonts etc. but the right text was vital. This had been developed over many years, and much of it was as a result of various problems with customers.

We had got thru the initial planning stages and were starting to work on the config and data. At one of the sessions, someone from finance asked about the documents (invoice, sales forms, shipping forms etc.) - the consultants' project manager told us that someone would be working on these. Now we had been told that we would go live on a date 9 months after the initial launch - when we got to month 6, and there was still no sign of the documents, the question was raised yet again.

At that point, a director from the system integrator firm got involved and he basically tried to tell us that we would be using the standard SAP forms as that was all we required. You can imagine that there were some fairly strong discussions about this - it had been highlighted that we needed the specific text and we weren't prepared to move on that. Eventually, he gave in and arranged for a specialist to come to site to work on the revised documents.

Now I had previously worked on another ERP product and had produced numerous standard forms pretty quickly - generally, once you know what is wanted, it takes maybe a day to get the right data output, and then maybe a few tweaks to get the formatting right. I expected that SAP might be a bit more work, but as a basic design already existed, I thought it was just going to be a matter of making the relevant changes to ensure that we had the right logo, the right addresses and text statements.

The specialist turned up on site and started on this a couple of days a week. About 3 weeks later, we were given what the consultant said was our invoice - and forgive me for saying this, but it was a bunch of crap. It was missing two whole sections of text, it showed the wrong address for the company, none of the text boxes lined up and when it printed, part of the page was missing and our company logo was squashed up so that it looked wrong. The CEO wrote all over the printout in red pen to highlight the areas to fix, then gave it back to the consultant. She worked on it again for another 2 weeks and sent a copy to us. The CEO hit the roof as it looked like nothing had changed at all.

This went on for another couple of months with the consultant turning up on site every few weeks and supposedly working on it from home in between. But after about 4 months, not one of the forms that we needed was actually complete. This lead to more discussions - as we had already decided to delay the go-live, we could live with it, but at that stage were only moving the go-live by a month or two at a time, so it was really important to get the forms completed.

After more complaints, another consultant started to work on it. A couple of months later, we had some of the sales documents, and some for the shipping, but the invoice was still missing. In the end, we finally got the version that we went live with about 2 months before the go live date - about a year after we should have gone live. The invoice form still wasn't exactly right, but we could live with the slight inconsistencies in alignment as long as the text was OK.

As it happens, after go live, we then hit a snag. A process had been set-up so that the invoice would be automatically generated once all of the parts for an order had been shipped. There were a couple of exceptions - we have a couple of big customers that buy regularly, and we are able to invoice for goods shipped as part of orders, even if the whole order has not been completed. The week after go live was OK, but the invoice run after that was not.

As it happens, we quickly found that this was actually down to us - there was a procedural problem, and stuff was not getting marked up properly. As a result, we had some orders going out that should have been invoiced, but weren't - and this lead to a number of other items that were then being blocked. As it happens, altho this lead to a bit of a panic, we did get it fixed real quick and the invoices started going out again. In fact, this an area where we definitely had not had the kind of issues that so many other projects seem to have had.

But a couple of weeks ago, we had a real serious issue. The invoices are printed off on a big high speed printer in the finance office. The print run generally takes about 15-20 minutes each day for those that are not transmitted electronically (and there is an increasing amount of those). One of the staff in accounts noticed that the print run hadn't occurred - after checking, one of my staff realised the printer was not working at all.

Well no problem - just re-direct the print job to a different printer. After all we do this all the time without any issues with all the other forms. But it appeared that we couldn't do that with the invoices - every attempt, the print job was being sent to the faulty printer. Eventually we realised that for some reason, the printer selected was actually hard coded into the form and couldn't be changed on the fly unlike all the others. Now why this is the case, I have no idea - it is just the way that it has been setup.

As it happens, we have got around the problem. We have another machine of the same make and model. We've changed the settings on the print server so that the replacment machine has exactly the same share name and IP address as the faulty one, and we were able to set it up within SAP to replace the faulty machine, so we can now print off the invoices as we should.

It has caused a slight holdup in the billing process - I spent about 5 hours on Friday with one of my staff helping the finance staff get the newly printed invoices put into envelopes ready to be posted. This has helped them catch up, and as everything has gone out in the same month as it should have, we shouldn't get too much of a delay in billing.

But I see this as a major irritation - I can see the need perhaps for labels to have the printer hard coded in them to make sure that they go to the right type of machine. But why an invoice? I really can't see why they should have done that. I also have to say that this was an area that I wanted to try to get a better handle on, but the consultants were simply not interested in passing on any of their precious knowledge and no-one got chance to learn how to work with the forms. I did get a book on it, but it wasn't much help.

I've also tried to get one of my staff booked in on a course to learn about changing forms, but there doesn't seem to be one available until next year. We also have a major problem now in that we have a lot of work coming up, and some of it will be last minute organised (nothing we can do about it - we have to be flexible to fit in with others). It could be that we will simply have to wait - and hope that the printer doesn't break down again.

However, I suppose that now we know the problem exists, we are in a better position. We know how to get around the issue, so we shouldn't get the same delay if it happens again. With luck, the replacement printer will last until we can get someone trained up so that we can get this form fixed more appropriately. With a bit of luck, we will have a couple of quiet weeks to make up for the rather more hectic weeks of the last month!

Count the cost

2010-10-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I highlighted the case of a local government organization which had tried unsuccessfully to implement SAP. As it happens, one of the regular readers of this blog had let me have details of another case in California shortly before that - I have been trying to get some more information on the situation out there, but without much success. In both cases, they have spent a great deal on their implementation without seeing any real benefits - and it looks highly likely that they could cancel their projects having spent millions of public finance for no real value.

About a month ago, I was browsing thru SCN (SAP Community Network). I read an article that I found really interesting (can't remember who by, and can't seem to find it again). The author asked why there were so many stories of poor implementations, and so few stories of successful ones. If I were to be a bit facetious, I might say that it reflects the real situation - but I am actually not sure that is the case. I found the comments made in the item quite interesting, particularly when analyzing the two cases I've highlighted and the situation at the place where I work.

As a general rule, if people are satisfied, they tend not to say very much - they will only make the point publicly if they are extremely pleased. On the other hand, if they are not happy for any reason, they will let you know, often in no uncertain terms! This is just the way that people are - anyone working in customer service will be aware of this. It's usually seen as normal that you will get a lot more letters of complaint than you will of praise - and the complainers will often highlight relatively minor issues, whereas the praisers will normally highlight more major aspects.

One of the common complaints over SAP implementation is that the cost is so high. In our case, we have now spent over $2.5 million with the System Integrators, and it is still climbing. But that doesn't include the internal costs of staff time involved in the project. No exact figures have been kept, but it would seem that most people agree we have spent at least another $1.2 million, probably more, and there is more to come yet.

And we are not finished - we have to roll SAP out to sites overseas, and no-one is prepared to guess what the costs will be, and certainly not what the final tally will reach once they are all done. It also seems likely that once we complete the intial implementation, we could find that we are paying for further development work - it's possible that the project costs will continue to rise over the next couple of decades.

Now there are many that will say we haven't actually spent that much - after all, the implementations at the two organisations highlighted have both been in the 10s of millions of dollars. But they are both much bigger projects, with more people involved so they are bound to be more costly. They have greater revenue streams, so can afford bigger budgets. In our case, the amount committed is many times higher than was originally planned and it has eaten up our annual profits for the last couple of years. It makes it difficult to find cash to pump into other areas of the business that are in need of investment, and this could have a negative impact on our ability to continue to trade.

There are those that say a project involving an ERP implementation cannot just be judged on the same criteria that a smaller project would be assessed against. For example, cost and time overruns are less important than making sure the project does actually get finished and that the product should be judged on many more aspects. I can see the logic in this, and to an extent, I would accept that we do have to take much more of an overview for such a major operation. But equally, no-one should just continue to pour greenbacks into something if there is no indication that the results will justify the expenditure.

In our case, we were assured right back at the beginning, that the costs for the first five years of software, consultancy and support, would be around $1.3 million. Clearly that was a badly underestimated figure and in fact we will probably have spent more than 3 times that much, not including the costs of our own people by the 5 year mark. If that were to result in savings, extra sales or improved margins, then an argument could be made that it was all worthwhile. I would agree that we have seen some efficiencies, but I'm afraid not enough to offset the high cost of the project.

No-one believes that implementing SAP will actually help us sell more - it doesn't make the sales process any easier, and is not going to help us win new business. It may help us improve our margins, but that is more of a long term initiative and won't help us deal with more urgent concerns. I may be wrong, but I suspect that we may never see any return on our investment, even if we take a really long term view of 25 years.

So how do we then assess the value of our implementation? I wish I could answer that. Yes it is working and in that we have clearly been more successful than some others. But has the cost been too high? Only time will tell.

D - Fense

2010-09-19T09:38:00.001-07:00

Some time ago, I went to a vendor sponsored event. These are usually good places to pick up on new technologies. find out what else is going on and also network with other people within the industry. It also allows me to take some time off away from normal activities, and re-charge my batteries so to speak.

I took a short break during the lunch period and started talking to a guy who told me that he was the IT manager for a government organization. Although he and I have the same job title, he has a lot more responsibility - a base of several thousand users and a large team of specialists working for him.

During the conversation, the topic of SAP came up - it turns out that his organization has also installed SAP. It appears they started about a year before we did, and went live a couple of months before us. Although there is little in common between our two businesses, we had similar issues with the SAP implementation. We swapped business cards and made promises to contact each other again. This is quite common practice, but generally I wouldn't expect to hear from anyone afterwards.

To my surprise, I got an email from this guy a short while ago. In it, he detailed a number of issues regarding their project and the people involved. They have been using one of the top tier consultancies and have spent many 10s of millions of dollars so far. Although they went live well over a year ago, they still have consultants on site - in fact these people almost have their own office space and on any given day, they will have between 5 and 10 consultants working on something to do with the product.

I've now shared several emails with this guy. Although he didn't specifically ask me not to reveal too many details, I wouldn't want to put him in an awkward position, so I am going to be a bit careful. However, I can say that he and his staff feel very unhappy about the position they are in. From his comments, it seems that the consultants almost never talk to the IT staff or manager. Certainly, the IT staff appear to have had limited training at best and in most cases, none at all.

The project itself seems have been entirely managed by the consultancy firm, and very little communication seems to have occurred between them and the IT department or the business process owners. Worse, the end users seem to have had equally limited training. At this stage, the IT staff take calls from the end users, record the issue what ever it might be, and then just pass it on to the consultants. He indicated that on some occasions, they get a response the same day, but in most instances, it is usually several days before they are offered a resolution - in most cases, they just get told that the issue is "closed".

When they started their project, an amount of money was allocated specifically for training. All of this has now been sucked up by by the project along with amounts budgeted for other IT projects. It appears that the money pit that is SAP just gobbles up cash, and at this stage, they seem to be able to do little with the product in terms of the business processes - he indicated that not one module seems to be working as it should.

I have to be honest, I feel really sorry for this guy and his staff. I've been there, I have the war marks and I know just how frustrating it can be. There were times when I seriously doubted that we would be able to get some of the processes working. I wanted to try to help him out and give him some practical advice - I then realised something really bizarre.

I was trying to defend SAP.

Seriously, I actually found myself writing to him, telling him that once it was working, he would be really pleased at how he could get certain things working for him. I've passed information to him on certain specific transactions for admin and systems monitoring. I know that several of these have been previously unknown to him or his staff - he asked for clarifaction how to use the t-code. He also came back with questions about some of the information that they found, some of which I have been able to assist him with.

From my point of view, one of the most serious issues was to do with user permissions - previously, all of this had been managed by the consultants. I've helped this guy understand how to analyse what permissions have been allocated, and also how to test to see where they are going wrong. What got me was how greatful he was for the information that I was able to give him.

I'll be honest, I've not been impressed with the consultants that we have had working on our project. I felt that they didn't achieve a lot of the things that they were supposed to do. Most of our internal project people struggled to get the required information they needed, and it seemed to take far too long to get some of what we saw as fairly simple issues resolved. I think that we have spent a great deal of money and at the moment, don't really have a lot to show for it in terms of ROI. But at least our system is working, and people can use it to do the basics.

But when we compare our implementation to the project at this other organization, ours is a runaway success.

It got me talking to one of my staff - I discussed the issues they had had, and what would be needed to correct them. He then made a comment that perhaps we could hire ourselves out as "guns for hire" - experienced IT staff with SAP knowledge that could go around the companies trying to install SAP having issues, and help them get the problems resolved. He was a bit taken aback when I pointed out that such people already existed - and they are called "consultants"!

Making up the numbers

2010-09-12T01:37:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, one of the managers asked me to help him out with a small problem. He needed to extract some data from the SAP system, then put the data into a spreadsheet so that he could analyse the figures.

My immediate reaction was why should he do it that way - surely it would be easier to do the analysis within SAP? After all, the main reason for buying the product was to have the single system that would allow all of the data to be seen thru one system, and having now spent several million dollars on the project, it would be better to make use of it to try and justify that spend.

For many years now, the various departments have used Excel spreadsheets to do the analysis functions needed. We had literally many thousands of spreadsheets stored on servers (and even worse, on people's PCs) all for different things. It was (and still is) quite simply impossible to keep track of all that data. I know that in many cases, people have re-done a spreadsheet several times, because they couldn't remember where they stored the previous one and can't find it amongst all the many others.

But here's the worst part - many of those files are just simply placeholders for data, there is actually very little processing going on. For example, the manager in question has done a great job of designing his spreadsheet. Columns and rows are very carefully sized, colors have been applied to help make cells stand out, and the relevant labels are in place so that you see what the data refers to. But there is not one single formula in the whole file, not one macro or piece of VB to actually process the data. The whole thing is created by hand and must have taken well over an hour - and only has half the data that he needs, so in fact it is a complete waste of time unless he can then get the data he needs.

So back to my original question, why would he waste time on extracting only half the data and not do the processing within SAP? The answer is simple - because the half of the data he needs is actually not in SAP. He has obtained some of the data from our overseas sites, and then wants to extract the SAP data, merge it with the data from overseas, and then manually process it thru the spreadsheet. The data he needs is static data, so it is not affected too much by sales etc. But it was never created in SAP and at this stage won't be for a number of years.

This actually goes back to a decision that was made early in the project. We had been given a date for go-live very early on - it was agreed that it would be 9 months after the project launch. The consultants were very bullish about this and thought that it would be really easy to meet the deadline. However, about half way thru the "blueprint" stage, they started talking about "Phase 1", "Phase 2" etc. even tho' we had always said that the whole project was to be done in one go. But we started to agree with them - as people began to realize just how much work was going to be required, it made sense to concentrate on the key requirements.

The problem was that we were concerned with the amount of data that needed to be obtained from our overseas sites, with cleaning and preparation, we just wouldn't have time to get it done and meet the go-live. It therefore seemed appropriate to forget about that data - after all, if it was missing, it wouldn't really cause an issue, would it?

However, I don't think anyone really understood just how much work that missing data would then cause once we had gone live. Unfortunately, it seems to affect almost all departments and there are serious issues as a result that are causing people to have to spend large amounts of time and effort from a few people just to get around the problem.

I think that there is no question, the decision was made for the right reasons - if we had gone live on the original date, there is simply no way that we could have got that data and loaded in time. But we had to delay the go-live and by over a year - I feel that we should have then looked at that decision and then possibly chosen to import the other data after all.

The problem was that we didn't move the go-live date in one go, from the orginal date to one a year later. The consultants kept insisting that we were very close even tho' it was pretty obvious to most people that the reality was we were nowhere near ready. The go-live date was moved by a month or two at the most every time - and so the thought of loading the overseas data never really landed on the radar.

We now have an issue and I'm not sure if we are going to get a resolution any time soon. If we had gone live on the original date, then according to original plans, we would have had the first of the overseas sites live in July this year. In fact they haven't even started work on their side of it. The consultants have said they can go live at the beginning of the new year, and yet so far not one person on that site has had any training, or has even logged onto the system. But the most serious issue from my point of view is that they have yet to even begin to extract the data from their legacy systems. I suspect that it is unlikely they will be ready until the second quarter of next year at the earliest.

We also have a couple of other sites that need to go thru the same process - and on the original plans, they were due to go live in July of next year. At this stage, no-one believes that will happen - I did hear one person suggest that they may not go live until 2013 and possibly not even until 2014. This means that the problems with the data not being in the system is going to be with us for many more years yet to come - and we will continue to have people spend time and effort trying to get around this issue.

Of course, it is always easy to be a Monday morning Quarterback. But I think if we had known back at the beginning just what issues we were going to face, then at some stage someone would have insisted we make time to get the rest of that data. Quite simply we are wasting probably as much time every month as would have been spent on getting that data loaded.

I have to say that I accept that we made the decision, but I do feel that once again we were let down by our consultants. We had no-one in the company with SAP experience so were relying on them to give us the right guidance. I think that the people we had just didn't have the right amount of experience to provide us with the right advice - and we are now paying for that with the amount of time and effort that is being spent getting around an issue caused by a decision made without understanding the full implications.

The price is right

2010-09-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

Anyone that has read this blog will know that I regularly criticize the consultants that have worked on our project - but I have also indicated where I think that the company and our project team (and my staff and I) have not done so well. On this occasion, I'm going to concentrate on an area where I think we made a big mistake right back at the beginning and what we should have done and why.

First, I should say that I believe that there is only one way to determine the price for goods to be sold, no matter what they are, how they are made, how they are sold or what industry sector they are in. It's necessary to know what something costs you - the wholesale price of the item, the price of the raw materials, however it starts. You then add in the various costs needed to perform the tasks that add value to the goods, and any overheads. Once you have your final cost, you can then decide what margin you need and uplift the price accordingly, and of course then discount it to help sell the goods. Within that process, it is possible to have a myriad of different techniques - but it all starts from knowing what something costs you.

However, not everyone does it that way, and I regret that we are the same. Many years ago, someone sat down and did the calculations, then produced a "price list" that gave us a reasonable return on the sales. But since then, all that has happened is that each year the prices are uplifted by a fixed amount (or percentage amount) - and now after 20, 30, 40 years of trading, the price we charge bears little relationship to the cost price.

In fact, we don't actually ever know if we are selling something for a profit - the only time we know that the organization has made a profit is after the year end when all of the accounts are settled and we can declare a profit. And it gets worse - we have more than one price list. In fact we have so many that we have more price lists than we have sales staff and different customers get quoted from different lists. Despite what our sales people try to say, I know that they regularly used to make pricing errors when providing detailed quotes for customers.

Now the introduction of SAP was a superb opportunity to correct this - we could have had just the one price list and based it upon what the costs were. In fact, it was one of the key requirements for the new system that we should be able to determine costs on each individual product, so that we could achieve a sensible and balanced profit margin across the board.

Some work was done on establishing the costs, but it turned out that these fiugures were from our old system, and modified based upon certain assumptions. Unfortunately, they have proven to be less than accurate. Worse, instead of developing a new pricing system based upon this, the old price lists were entered into the SAP system and we are effectively still using the old pricing.
that we used previously

Now all is not lost - after operating for a year, we are starting to get some information from the system that means we can start to put some sensible values in for the costs and activity rates. These show that some of our intial assumptions were way out, but some were not too bad under the circumstances. The general feeling is that in about a years time, we will have values that are about as accurate as we could get, and most people would be happy to use those.

However, we are still no nearer getting a pricing structure that will give us confidence of selling anything for a profit. I know that our sales people don't agree with me on this - but I can guarantee that not one of them actually knows what sort of a profit we make on any sale at all. As it happens, I am sure that we are making a profit, but I'd be very surprised if we couldn't do better at both selling and making a profit if we had a better pricing structure.

I suppose that we can say that this is a project for the future, and I'm certain that if we did do this, we would see some benefits. But I doubt that there will be any pressure from the sales staff to change - they are happy with their current method and they see no problem at all in continuing with the same old system. I just feel that we have missed a golden opportunity to make a significant improvement to our processes.

Call me certifiable

2010-08-22T02:32:00.001-07:00

There is no question that the advent of the PC has made a huge difference to businesses. Over the last 20 plus years, we have seen the introduction of systems that are designed to improve the way that we operate. The PC promised more accurate information processing, better analysis, greater efficiencies, and faster communication. However, this came with a slight downside - unfortunately, there were not enough people that knew how the computers worked.

My youngest daughter has a book, and one of the quotes in it is "when she was good, she was very, very good; when she was bad, she was horrid!". There are a lot of people that work with PCs that could say the same of their systems - when they work well, everyone can operate them. But when things go wrong, you need to have someone that understands what is going on behind the scenes and rectify any problems.

However, a lot of people of that time that called themselves "IT staff" were just people that had turned a hobby into a job. Far too many of them knew enough to make it sound as if they were experts, but in reality, they relied upon the lack of knowledge of other people so that they could just BS the way thru a problem. Companies needed to have someone available to help fix problems, but they didn't know if a particular person actually had the right skills or not.

Over a decade ago, Microsoft introduced their MCSE certification. The idea was simple - produce a formal training and examination process that could offer organizations a way to see if a potential hire actually had the relevant skills. Others were doing the same - they all saw the value to their business model by offering customers a means of being more comfortable with their purchase, by knowing that people they employed had a minimum level of skills.

The problem was that the certifications then meant that some people could command higher salaries - and that then lead to the "brain dump" sites that offered people the chance to learn answers to specific questions, without necessarily knowing the product that well. These were followed by "boot camps" - places that could allow you to undertake intensive training for a week or two just to pass the exam. These lead to what became known as "paper MCSEs" - people that had the certification, but not the experience to go with it.

Since starting our SAP project, I've obviously taken more note of a lot of things that I see out on the Internet to do with SAP. Like a lot of people, I've seen the posts from people asking how they can get into SAP consultancy. I suspect that in most cases, they've heard that they earn a whole bunch of money from this and are hoping that they can a course or two, get a certification, then sit back and watch the dollars roll in. I don't know if there is such a phrase as "paper SAP consultant", but I think that such people are out there in abundance.

What worries me a bit is that I think this is more common than most realize - and as a result, we get consultancy firms charging their customers $1500 a day, but they then employ the newly qualified people on maybe half that. We were given the resumes of the consultants that we were to get which were satisfactory - but when we didn't get the experienced people that we were promised, we should have done something about it, certainly asked for more info on the people we did get.

As it happens, I have taken a couple of courses at an SAP Training center and I think that the quality of training there is very good. I have made a couple of my staff take courses and they have learned a lot - and there is no question that this will help us do our jobs better. But it worries me a little that one of my staff now has an SAP certification - although he has taken the courses and done a little bit of work on the product, I would question if he is really sufficiently experienced for him to be at that level. He could in fact leave to go somewhere else with that paper - but I wouldn't yet suggest that he is actually ready to become a consultant.

I've also noticed that this is an issue that concerns a lot of people within the SAP consultancy world - they see the poorly trained, barely certified people screwing up and giving them a bad rep. I can actually understand their concern over this and I think that it is good that is recognized as an issue. I think that SAP could do themselves a big favor by monitoring just what a lot of people with their certifications are doing out there - I think that they might not be too happy with what they find.

Now I don't pretend to have a complete answer to this problem - but I think that it would have to start with listening to some of the more experienced independent people. They are the ones that suffer the most from other people's poor performance, and they generally have less to gain by covering up problems.

I have a qualification on the wall behind my desk - it shows that I have undertaken a considerable amount of work over many years to achive a high standard in my work that hs been recognized by a prestigious institution. And yes, I am quite proud of that qualification as I am of the many others that I have obtained. I wouldn't mind adding an SAP certification into my collection - but only if I feel that it means something of real value, and not that it is just there to allow me to ask for an extra five hundred bucks a year.

Meet me in St Louis

2010-08-06T23:35:00.001-07:00

We had a team meeting the other day, and it got me to thinking about some of the project meetings we have had in the past.

A lot of people don't like team / project meetings - all too often, you can see them drifting into their own little worlds, trying to hide their yawns, doodling on pads, apparantly fascinated by their socks, desperate to be anywhere but where they are. But meetings are important - you have to keep people informed, get them to agree on what is going to happen and make sure that what is planned doesn't cause too much disruption or interfere in other peoples planned work.

For that reason, I like to have shorter meetings, with a clear agenda - preferably one that has been sent out before hand, so that everyone can prepare. (There is nothing worse than someone going to a meeting and suddenly being asked about something, and they have to speak off the cuff - too often, they forget important points.) There should always be notes taken and someone should type these up and circulate them so that everyone has access to a record of the details.

I also like to see clear action points at the end of meetings - with responsibilities and timetables or deadlines agreed. I also have no issue if someone fails to meet a deadline - we all have other work to do, sometimes this has to take precedence. But a meeting without an agenda or an agreed plan of action at the end, is just a talking shop, with no benefit to the business.

When the consultants organised the first launch meeting, they did actually have an agenda - but it wasn't circulated before hand, they just had it as part of a PowerPoint presentation which they referred to during the meeting. Unfortunately, the points listed were pretty brief - mostly just the names of the key stages within the process to be followed. They talked a lot about the stages, but again, mostly in fairly bland details.

The meeting dragged on for over 5 hours, not including the 40 minute break in the middle or the two coffee breaks. I still have my notes from the meeting and in the corner I have written "they could have covered all this in under an hour". I believe that I may have shown the note to one of my colleagues during the meeting.

For me tho', the biggest issue was that at the end of the meeting, no-one had a clear idea of what anyone was supposed to do, when the work was to be done by, what the next steps were or pretty much anything else. I remember a few days later, I spoke to a manager from the production area and asked about a particular issue related to assembling data on the products list - he replied that he thought that was for those of us in IT to do. When I pointed out that it was necessary to make sure the information was correct, and that only his people could do that, he was astonished - he had no idea of what I was talking about. I also had similar discussions with virtually every other department head, all of whom had been at the same meeting!

I did actually speak to the project leader from the consultants about making sure that information from meetings was properly circulated - his response was that it was our project and therefore it was our responsibility to manage all of these details. I can agree on things such as notes, action lists, and circulating details etc. but they were the ones actually planning and running the meetings, and therefore putting the agenda together. I felt that as we were paying for their experience in the project, it would not have been unreasonable to expect them to provide details of agendas and when their people would have been on site, and what they were there to do - but clearly, he didn't agree with this.

As it happens, shortly after that first meeting, I organised a structure for the notes to be taken and posted on an intranet site as a resource for people to refer to. I also tried to get a regular action list agreed, altho' that proved a bit problematic, particularly if I wasn't at the particular meeting. Many of the presentations were supplied by the consultants and were also posted, but I don't think anyone actually bothered to refer to these as they contained so little of any benefit. I also setup a snag list and that very quickly became a very lengthy file.

Looking back on it now, I think that if we had been able to get a bit more disciplined from the start over the way that meetings were planned and organised, and there had been a more structured approach to getting notes, actions lists etc out after meetings, this would have made sure that we stayed a bit more on track. Certainly I feel that there was an amount of time wasted due to lack of adequate control.

It would be unfair to blame all of this on the consultants - partly it has to come down to company culture and the individuals concerned. But I think that the consultants could have given some better guidance - they are supposed to have seen many projects, so should know the importance of getting organised and making sure that everyone knows and understand what is required.

If you start off in a particular manner, people generally continue in that way - unfortunately, if you don't get the right type of disciplined structure in at the beginning, people will just do their own thing, and instead of everyone working together, you get a more haphazard approach. As it happens, we overcame that, primarily by sheer hard work on the part of everyone on the team. But I think that it could have been made much more effective from the beginning and getting the organisation of meetings correct is a first step to a better project.

Evaluating efficiency

2010-07-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the SAP implementation project, it was identified that one of the key drivers was to improve efficiency. We had a large number of systems, none of which talked to each, and as a result, a large number of staff were involved in just manipulating data. It made sense to try to get all of the data in a single system so that it would be easier to work with - and don't say this too loudly, but it was felt that we could perhaps reduce headcount by being more efficient.

We were told that it was possible to improve processes by using the various processes that were built into the SAP software. A number of key areas were identified and we looked forward to seeing these in action. However, in most of those areas, we have still yet to see any significant improvement. In some cases, we have had to take on a couple of staff as the process is now a bit more complex than before.

However, there is an area where we have seen some spectacular improvements - the funny thing is that it was completely unexpected. It has made a major difference to many departments, has saved hours of work every week, reduced waste and saved a sizable amount of money.

When I first joined the comapny, I discussed the concept of electronic document management - at that time, everything was paper based. It was decided that it was not practical, and when we started work on SAP, it was not even put on the blueprint. Having talked to one of the consultants, he did some work for us to set it up, and I bought and installed some hardware to allow staff to scan all incoming documents.

To begin with, there were a few teething issues - getting people to understand where the files were being scanned to was the biggest, and then getting these attached to the relevant item within SAP. But within a fairly short time period, almost everyone was getting to grips with the system.

To explain in more detail, let's look at the sales office. They process around 1,000 orders a week - and every day without fail, they will get a number of queries about an order that has been placed. In the past, this caused some considerable work - although they had access to the data entered, people would question if the order had been entered correctly. The staff member would have to take the customer's details, then hang up, and go look for the original documentation.

As this was not a key driver, we don't have hard evidence of the time taken to recover the paper files, but it is generally accepted that it would normally take between 15 and 30 minutes for each order. (Some would take longer, particularly if the file was misplaced). The staff member would then have to call the customer back wasting more time - and of course, it caused some frustration with the clients.

Now, if someone queries an order, the sales person can click on a link and the scanned file opens up in a matter of seconds. I don't use it that regularly, but I can find and open an order, and then the scanned file in about 40 seconds - the sales staff can do it in just over half that time. And it is not just the sales office that benefits from this - purchasing, accounts, distribution are all making good use of this facility. In fact, we estimate that we are saving the time equivalent of between 4 and 5 full time staff each and every week with the document management system. (My colleagues agree that is a conservative estimate.) We think that as we roll it out to other sites, the savings could be as much as 20 full time staff.

Now don't get me wrong, we are not going to be laying staff off any time soon - but the time saved is going to allow us to do more things that we need to. Sales can do a bit more cold calling, a bit more customer relationship management etc. Some of the saved time will be used to make sure that they have more time to concentrate on other areas where they are not so confident.

I had a comment from one of the staff the other day - she said that the document management system on its own was almost worth the effort of the SAP implementation. Well, I'm not sure that I would totally agree as the cost has been so high. But it is an area that we can point to, in order to highlight success in the project, and as my old football coach used to say "a win is a win".

Now a lot of people within IT will say that this should not be such a surprise - electronic document mangement has been around for many years, and the benefits are well known and fully documented. But you have to understand that for our company, this is a completely new way of working - and one that took a bit of effort to get people to use in the initial stages.

If staff get excited about it because they can now see some tangible benefits, then that is a good thing (a really good thing!). We can then try to use that to get them on board with other aspects of the SAP system. If one area of the system makes their jobs easier, then maybe we can encourage them to be more positive about the rest of the system - and who knows, maybe we will eventually be able to say with hand on heart that the project was worthwhile. We may even see a return on our investment!

Trouble with training

2010-07-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

When I was still in high school, I had an English teacher for a year, who told me something that I still remember - "Learning is a science; but teaching is an art". At the time, I didn't fully understand what he meant, but over the years, I have come to see that this is actually a very profound statement.

Since college, I have worked hard to keep my skills up to date. I've read technical material, books and white papers, many of which I have kept - and these have sections highlighted or pages marked out with colored tabs. I scribble comments in the margins, and occasionally use post-it notes as well. I use a structured method to read, digest and understand the various items, and it is clear that this is a scientific approach to gaining knowledge. For me, this is the best way to learn new things - altho I always then want to try to apply what I have learned in a test environment.

However, this method doesn't suit everyone. Altho I am happy to spend my own time wading thru various documents, most of my colleagues are not so eager. They leave work at the end of the day, and don't really want to spend their leisure time on what they see as "work related" tasks. Having said that, they are also not too keen to spend much of their working day reading books. At the beginning of the project, we bought a number of the SAP Press books (and some others) which were handed out to the relevant department heads - many of these books were opened once, a few pages looked at, then closed, and they have remained that way since.

The reality is that not everyone is comfortable with self-learning material - they find it difficult to motivate themselves to work their way thru the material, and have difficulty in relating what they read to the work that they do. This is an issue that affects a lot of the training that we carry out, not just SAP - and this is where the teaching "art" comes in. It is necessary for the tutor to understand that each person is different and requires different methods to learn - and the teacher has to have a streak of creativity that allows them to develop ways of presenting the material that will get thru to the student.

During the project, the various project leaders were encouraged to create self-study items to be used by the staff. These were generally involving a single process or part of process - for example, "how to create a sales order" or "how to release a purchase order". I setup a shared repository for these files, and access permission was given to all staff to read and a few more senior people to change or replace, so that they could go thru the files, make whatever changes were felt appropriate to make the materal as relevant as possible.

Unfortunately, it appears that none of the staff actually use this material. Altho it has been specifically aimed at providing them with the right information, and they have all been reminded of where to find it, no-one actually makes any use it at all. It seems that the concept of learning by reading is totally alien to them and that doesn't look as if it is going to change any time soon.

When I first joined the company, I expressed my concern at what I saw a very low level of IT literacy amonsgt staff. People had learnt by rote - "press button 3, press button A, press F7". They had no idea of what these keystrokes did, or why they had to press them - they just knew that was the sequence.

In many cases, altho they were carefully trained to use other equipment, or given instruction in safety procedures, they had received little or no training on how to do the specific task on the computer. At best, someone else that just knew the sequence without understanding why would pass on that information, often by writing it down on a sticky note which was then pasted on the monitor.

Senior management were not particularly bothered - they didn't see the need for staff to be "IT Trained" as they put it. I can understand that there is a limit, but I do feel that a lot of problems are caused by inadequate training, and these create problems, delay work and all of this will actually end up wasting money.

With the SAP project, I had hoped that we move away from this attitude and be able to get people properly trained. The problem is of course that if people don't have the right motivation, then it is unlikely that they will improve their skills. If we can't improve work practices, then we will never get the full value out of the SAP project. I therefore suggested that we needed to have a properly dedicated training facility.

So we set-up a fully equipped training room for IT - this is available for everyone to use and there was some good use made of it before the go-live. However, since then it hasn't been used once. I think that this is a shame as it could help us get more out our investment. But with so few people having the self-motivation to learn new stuff and the discipline to stick with it, I suspect that we will not see the value that we should.

Ultimately, we need to change people's perceptions - it is just no longer good enough for someone to know the sequence of key strokes, they need to understand the process and why they have to follow it.

Practice what you preach

2010-07-11T00:22:00.000-07:00

Over the years, SAP has worked with a lot of companies in different industries - they have seen many different ways of working, and various people have developed parts of the program to modify it, to allow better integration with the business processes of those organisations. When a vendor then sells SAP to a new customer, they then promote these as "best practices" and suggest that if the more successful companies (using SAP) use them, then it makes sense for the newer purchasers of SAP to use them as well if they wish to be equally successful.

I'm not sure that I fully endorse this idea - just because a successful business uses a particular process does not mean automatically that process will work elesewhere, or that it is the best way to do something. I've seen many different organisations and ways of working - each had their own methods of doing things and in most cases, they worked really well. However, I am prepared to keep an open mind on the topic.

I understand the concept of challenging existing practices, and agree that sometimes a business can get stuck with doing something a particular way because "that's how we've always done it". My own company had exactly this issue (and in some areas, I think that we are still suffering the same problem) and it makes sense to use the implementation project as an opportunity to examine what we do and try to find more efficient methods of working.

As it happens, I believe that this is a process that should never end. People should be encouraged to try to find better ways of doing things and as this does not always come naturally, it may be necessary to undertake appropriate training. I spoke to several of the consultants working on our project, and what became clear was that none of their people have attended any official SAP training sessions or seminars in the last 5 years. This would raise the question if the "best practices" that they are advising us to follow are actually the most appropriate or up to date.

However, I believe that the "best practices" are not just about the processes that are used within the normal business flow. I'm sure that some of the more seasoned SAP people that follow this blog will correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the "best practices" should also include the way that the SAP system is structured and managed. In particular, such elements as change management & testing are crucial and it is vital that correct procedures are followed to ensure that when development work is undertaken, it does not cause problems to the operations of the organisation.

I have to admit to being very concerned about the way that our consultants seem to ignore the practices that SAP promote in this area. As an example, shortly after go live, our internal project manager highlighted that we still needed a particular report (one that had been requested way back). One of the consultants worked on this and in due course, I received an email to request that certain staff should be given access to a new transaction that had been created from an existing one. But when I tried to do this in the golden list, the transaction simply did not exist. It turned out that he had unlocked the production client and created the new transaction - then locked the client, instead of creating it in the development system and transporting it in the approved manner.

I queried this in an email, and received no reply - I'm told that when the consultant concerned was questioned about it, he became angry and told the project manager that I was being unhelpful. I subsequently found that he then unlocked the production client again, and added the transaction to some roles, before locking it down. That worked fine for a couple of days, but after I had carried out another transport of roles between the systems for another update, the transaction was again not available.

Of course, he then did the work in the correct way (although I note that the transaction is slightly different in the production system to the one in development and test systems). But it seems strange that he wouldn't use the correct procedure to begin with - he should have known what would happen. I regret to say that this is not an isolated incident, and there have been several other similar issues with work not being done according to SAP's own guidance.

Another area of contention relates to testing of development work - or rather the non-testing of development work. Checking in the transport system, I see that one particular item was transported from development system to production system a dozen times in the space of an hour. It's clear that the consultant was not bothering to check anything in the development or test systems, but simply making a change, transporting it and testing in the production system.

What worries me a bit is that the project team have been working with the consultants, so they have seen these unsatisfactory processes and seen them as normal. If I suggest that doing something a particular way is not appropriate, they immediately point to the consultants and indicate that is the way that they do things.

So does it really matter if people don't quite follow this "best practice"? I would suggest that yes it does - SAP is a large, complex, inter-related piece of software. The procedures are there for a reason, to ensure that the changes that are required are working appropriately and do not cause issues elesewhere. If people don't follow the procedures, then things can go wrong, and putting them right can be a huge undertaking.

What is worse, if someone gets used to doing something in a particular way (even if it is wrong), then it is hard to get them to change. And this of course then brings us back to the beginning - we have replaced one set of practices with another, but neither of these are "good practices" and I seriously doubt that we could define them as "best practices".

But perhaps that is just me - it could be that I am making a mountain out of a molehill. These issues are causing the IT staff work, and we seem to spend time on dealing with what I see as unnecessary corrections rather than what I feel we should be doing, which is the more proactive work to maintain systems. However, we are coping, so maybe things are not so bad after all.

Confidence vs Arrogance

2010-07-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

I like to think that I am pretty confident, and generally for a good reason. Over the years, I've proven my skills many times - I've managed my teams, my budgets, some big projects and delivered real measurable benefits to the various companies that I have worked for. When I am in a particularly good mood, you may hear me say that I can fix anything, given the time and resources.

In fact, at one previous position, I was known as the "go-to guy" - if they had an issue, the first name that came up was mine. Where was I. what was I doing, could I be moved to take care of the problem. My direct manager loved to use football metaphors -he told me that whenever someone fumbled the ball, they looked to me to pick it up and run with it.

Having said that, I recognise that I don't always know the answer. Sometimes, it is necessary to fully analyse a problem, and look at alternative answers before choosing a course of action. It's often necessary to look to other people for advice and support - and sometimes even relatively junior members of staff can have good ideas. It's foolish to ignore these just because of the status of the person, but a lot of people will do just that. And I'm more than happy to accept that I've made a few bad decisions at times - but I always try to learn from these so that I can prevent them being made again.

The problem is that sometimes, confidence can cross the line into arrogance. I would suggest that a couple of our consultants have crossed that line - and one guy in particular stands out.

When we first started the project, some 3 years ago, we were given a series of resumes of the people that would be working on the project with us from the consultancy. These looked really good, with a group of people that had all had at least 6 projects and and an average of 8 years working with SAP.

Unfortunately, none of these people were ever "available" to actually work on our project, so we had a group of people that we knew little about. What became clear was that in most cases, they had limited experience - an average of 2 or 3 projects with at most a couple of years experience.

However, the one particular guy was uber confident - if you listened to him, he had almost 20 years experience of SAP and had worked on literally dozens of projects. He certainly seemed to be the one that the others looked to for advice whatever the problem.

As it happens, I met someone that knows this guy from a previous implementation. It turns out that he actually only has had coming up for 6 years experience, and our project is the first one that he has worked on for the whole lifecycle. Of the other projects he worked on, not one was for more than 5 months, and several of them were jobs that were being done at the same time and he was only a minor player in each one.

Added to that, the reason that his colleagues look to him, is that he makes changes without telling anyone or documenting the work - if someone has an issue, they check to see if it is caused by something that he has done. As for him being the one with the answers, it turns out that he has a direct line to some people that have a great deal of SAP experience, and whenever he hits a snag, he calls them - but then he presents their answer as his own.

Now to be fair, the guy has worked hard on our project - he has listed more days work than anyone else. He has dealt with complex requirements and produced some really good work, things that will eventually mean that we can get more out of our investment in SAP. It has taken a while but we are starting to see some of the benefits, and if we persist, I think that we will eventually have a system that we can be proud of.

The problem for me tho', is that it has taken a lot longer to get where we need to be, and that his over confidence has not helped us. A big issue is that he doesn't want to share his knowledge - he likes to do the work himself. This may be quicker in the short term, but it is clear that a key requirement for success with SAP is knowledge transfer, getting people to learn how to do things for themselves. It's also very frustrating when he makes decisons without sharing the reasons behind them - and particularly when subsequently they prove to be wrong, so that the work has to be re-done.

What really worries me is that now it has been agreed that this guy will be staying on to assist with carrying out a software upgrade instead of one of their basis guys being made available. I did ask him if he had done this work before, and he became quite incensed by the question, accusing me of not trusting him. Well it is quite simple - I can't trust him as he has been proven wrong several times with fairly serious consequences. The upgrade is a major step, and he has never even installed the software before, yet he seems to be utterly confident that he can do the upgrade work without a hitch.

Well we will see.

Keep on movin' on

2010-06-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

So after having made a few posts about what I've seen eleswhere, I'm back to writing about our project.

As you might expect, things have begun to settle into place. Most of the staff are now beginning to know what the processes are, they can generally carry them out most of the time and we are now starting to see some of the benefits of the SAP installation project.

We are seeing far fewer mistakes with the purchasing which had previously been very high. No-one has quantified this yet in detail, but it appears that we may see some savings in that area of about $100,000 per year due to fewer errors. Although this won't cover the cost of the project, it was an unexpected side benefit that will be very welcome. There is also evidence that it has reduced the work load on the purchasing staff by an amount which will also be beneficial.

The finance department still have some issues with analysis, but the data is going in the system, and with the ability to attach scanned copies of documents, they have significantly reduced the problems they used to get with missing files. Again it is not something that we have tried to put a value on, but the accounts manager has estimated that it is saving her staff 2-3 hours work per week. This may not sound a lot, but the time benefit does mean that they are able to concentrate more on the actual work they are paid for, rather than simply chasing down bits of paper.

Sales still have quite serious issues - I'm convinced that we have not got the right approach to pricing which makes it too complex. They are now looking at changing part of the process which I think will help. Customer feedback has been mixed with some people seeing fewer errors, but unfortunately also some fairly major failures due to a problem in the system. It appears that if someone places an order, and then a few days later changes the order, the due date for the goods is automatically pushed back a few days, and this has caused some delivery issues and this problem has yet to be resolved.

Shortly after our go-live, we added in an electronic fax server service which can supplement the email transmission of orders, invoices etc. We did this ourselves without the assistance of the consultants (they wanted to charge us $25,000 in consultancy fees to do the work!). Customer comments are that they appreciate the new feature - there were a few issues back at the beginning of the year, but they mostly seem to have been resolved. The only problems we get are down to inaccurate data regarding email address or fax number - sales staff were supposed to have cleaned up the data way back, but it appears that they could have done a better job.

Distribution have also seen some benefits, although they have had a few major problems caused by the orders being pushed back incorrectly. There were also some inventory issues for several months, probably due to faulty data at the beginning, but these now seem to have been corrected. For some years, we have wanted to implement bar code scanning and this is an area that we think will benefit from this - the staff are quite positive about the concept, and I think that they would make good use of it.

The production area generally is also seeing some benefits with the use of the technology - previously everything was on paper. Again, the details have yet to be accurately quantified, but the production manager suggested that we have seen reduced waste and a slight uplift in productivity. Nothing to set the world on fire, but enough to suggest that the process change is beginning to make a difference.

Unfortunately tho' the project system area is still struggling. About 40% of the work is repeat business and that seems to be generally OK, but the rest is all bespoke and we are still seeing far too many issues. We've had one particular consultant working on that are from the beginning and although I accept that the requirements are quite complex, I think that he seems to have taken a very long time to address some of the simpler issues. The scheduling of work has been one of the biggest issues and it still isn't working as it should which has an affect on so many other areas.

So pretty much a mixed message overall - definitely some benefits in time and cost savings, but some issues yet to be fixed that still frustrate everyone. We have a little bit more time to try to address these, but soon the company wants to start rolling SAP out across the rest of the group. We have a couple of sites in this country and a few others elsewhere and I think that we really need to try to get these problems sorted before rolling it out any further. However, I am a bit concerned that we won't get the time, as pressure is on to try to standardize across the group.

Still; as the man says, "keep on movin' on". We will get there, it may just take longer and require more effort than perhaps it should.

People get ready (part 2)

2010-06-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

I've been off-line for a couple of weeks - busy at work, then the chance of a last minute vacation. But I'm back now.

As I indicated, earlier this year, I had the chance to meet up with some people at companies that are also involved in SAP implementation. Two of the companies were large organizations - both had $1 billion per year plus revenue, so they were both much bigger than the one that I work for. One has about a dozen sites around the world, with between 250 and 500 staff at each - the other has about 80 sites around the world with between 30 and 200 staff at each.

In both cases, the parent sites(s) have already implemented SAP and are making good use of the product. One for about 2 years, the other for a little less. They are now planning to roll this out to the rest of the business and it was interesting to see how they plan to do this.

In both cases, they had a consultancy on site for the original implementation - one of these was well known, the other less so. The larger business took almost 4 years to get up and running, and although they didn't confirm this, I did hear that they had a false start, and after just over a year, pretty much went back to the beginning.

What was clear was that in both cases, they had a fairly clear idea of what they wanted to achieve from the project. They also had a set of KPIs to measure against, although one guy I spoke to said that these appeared to have changed after the false start. The directors of both organizations were keen to see the project succeed, and a great deal of effort went into making sure that the work was done as required.

However, in both cases, they indicated that they had major issues - a common complaint was that they didn't get the same consultants throughout the project and this lead to several instances of work beng delayed or being done incorrectly due to lack of consistency. I found it interesting that they also had issues in getting output documents sorted out, something that has plagued us from the beginning.

One thing that was clear in both cass, was that for their rollout across their larger business, they are very keen to avoid making use of any consultancy at all. There were a number of comments (some quite strong language as well) that indicated their preference for using their own internal staff as much as possible.

They have both set quite ambitious targets for the rollout - I did query this, and their senior management seemed keen to push ahead as quickly as they could. No doubt this was to try to see some sort of return for their investment The staff that I spoke to were not quite as confident that they could do it in the time allotted. One manager expressed serious concern at the proposed plans, indicating that it could mean no vacation time for any of the key project team for the next 3 or 4 years. She also said that most people agreed it seemed unlikely that they would be able to maintain the current plans, and the dates would inevitably slip.

As it happens, in both instances they are actually late starting their roll out to the other sites. In one case, they have been trying to get a suitable Project Manager, which they now have, but I was told that he has only ever been part of an SAP project, not actually running one. It also appears that he hasn't made him self popular with the senior managers. Having bee told what they wanted, he agreed that it was possible, and now he is in place, is insisting that they change the plans to roll them out over a longer period.

I will say though that I suspect in both cases, they should be able to achieve what they are planning to do, if not in the time frame set - they have previous experience, the right people in their teams and the right attitude from the senior managers. It appears that they have also spent a lot more time, effort and money in preparing their staff for the project. They both have excellent communications channels, and have done a much better job of engaging with their staff than we did (something I think that we could learn a lot from).

I have wished them both well and hope that I will be able to keep in touch. I think that it will be interesting to see how they get on.

People get ready (part 1)

2010-05-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

When we first started work on our SAP project nearly 3 years ago, I made a point of searching the Internet for material that might be of help in making our project a success. One of the sites that I found was Jon Reed's (www.jonerp.com) where I found a link to the SAP Blue Book by Michael Doane and others. (Michael has very kindly linked to my blog so I'm returning the favor - http://searchlight.blogspot.com) I bought a copy and have to say that I found it very useful - although, I must admit that I've gone back to read it again and note that there are several points that make much more sense now that I've been involved in an SAP installation.

One of the items raised in the Blue Book concerned the idea of seeing how ready a business is to implement an ERP solution like SAP. It identified areas where senior management should ask questions, that could highlight points of conflict, potential pitfalls and those things that will stop a project from being successful.

Now I've been able to see a number of other businesses in the last few months that are in different stages of an SAP implementation (partly why I've not been writing much). Having done only the one SAP project, I'm not trying to suggest that I'm some kind of expert, but I can use what we have been through, plus the information from various sources (including the Blue Book) to indicate a couple of the key items that caused us issues and perhaps others as well.

In our case, we had a really good idea of what we needed from an ERP system - and for the most part, senior management had communicated that to the management team. Most of the staff also had a pretty good understanding of what we hoped for. I will say tho' that we might have done a better job of assessing some KPIs to measure against, and that would be useful to see how far we have come and to measure the benefits more accurately.

Since the beginning of the year, I've been talking to some people at a company that started work on their SAP implementation almost a full year and half before us. Not only have they not gone live, they have now dumped their consultants and are suing them - they have given up on SAP and are looking at other products. I wanted to try to see what had gone so badly wrong, and I have to say that I can see that they were never ready to take on this huge a project.

Whilst we had identified the key needs of the business and understood why we needed an ERP system, I can't say the same of this other company. In fact, it seemed that they were looking at an ERP system because they had been told it was needed by a consultant, but didn't really see why. Certainly, the senior management team had not discussed it with the rest of the managers and none of the staff.

Worse, when it came to the project itself, they thought that it was a case of "install the software, get the manuals, learn the system, make lots of money". They had no previous experience of a large implementatoin, and thought that it was only another "IT project". None of the senior managers wanted to get involved - no-one discussed business processes, and when the consultants were on site, no-one was really ever available to work with them. Lots of excuses - "we have to keep the business running" etc. I'm sure that if you are reading this blog, you will have heard similar stories.

The reality is that well over 2 years into the project, they still thought that the software would be changed to allow them to continue running their business processes the same way that they always had. I was suprised that the were still trying to get it working when I spoke to them - their IT staff told me that they had only ever got the development system running and although the consultants had talked about the test and production systems, their senior managment thought that this was a "waste of time" and wouldn't pay for the additional equipment.

I have to be honest, I was amazed - we are using all of the SAP system apart from HR, Quality Control and Asset Management and it was live in just over 2 years- they had barely got the Sales working and some of the Finance after almost 3 years. It seemed to me that no-one in their company had even the slightest interest in making the system work - astonishing when you think of how much they had paid.

Now I have been pretty dismissive of the quality of the consultants that we had working with us - one area in particular was the transfer of knowledge. I felt that they just didn't seem to want us to understand how things were done (partly I think because their company wants us to buy their support package). However, I have to say that what was happening at his other company seemed even worse. Talking to their IT people, they had only the most basic understanding of how the SAP system runs. They had paid for it to be hosted, and thought that meant they would not then be required to do any work - boy were they surprised when they found out just what was not being done, and what was still expected of them!

Having spent a couple of days on site at this other place, and having had the chance to talk things thru with their key people, I can see just how much more our project team achieved, and how things could have been so much worse for us. Considering all the things that I have written about in the past, it seems unbelievable that we could be considered a success story, but it certainly seems that way.

Same old, same old

2010-04-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

I had actually planned a slightly different post, but with a few things happening at work, I've decided to update you on a couple of issues.

Some weeks back, we had the chance to get a consultant on site from another company. Boy - what a difference! This guy was not a native English speaker, but still managed to understand what we wanted and in the couple of weeks that he was with us, went thru the list of outstanding jobs and put a big dent in them. Several of these tasks have been hanging around for ages, and it has been really good to get them out of the way.

However from my point of view, the best thing was the last day that he was on site. He presented us with a document that detailed exactly what he had done - listing the specific items, a description of a revised process with the flow chart, screen shots as appropriate to show this and the details of some mods to a database table and a script as well. The document was close to 20 pages long and was quite superb. If ever we have an issue in future, there is no question that this document will guide us well.

Compare this to what we normally get from the normal consultants - zip, zero, ziltch. In several cases, they have done specific work and simply not told us about it. I had one particular case a couple of month ago when I received an email informing me that a specific piece of work had been done. I checked this - then I sent the guy a screen shot proving that he hadn't done what he said he had. He just ignored me and told our project leader that I should go ahead and process a change anyway. Best part of that was it didn't fix the problem - he then told the project manager that I hadn't done what was asked - our project manager sent a screen shot proving I had!

What really bites is that we are still using these people despite all of the issues we have experienced. I spoke to the Financial Director today and he is really pissed about this. His comment was that we are paying for these people to do shoddy work, then paying again for them to come back in to fix the mistakes that they make, and then paying a third time, because they didn't actually fix the issue at all. (Note that we are now 6 months past go-live, and there are STILL issues outstanding!)

He showed me the invoices from the consultancy for the last six months - and the total is astonishing. He has written to them several times to ask for proof of work done - they've claimed for people being on site when they haven't been any where near the place. Our total expenditure on the project has topped $3.25 million and is still climbing (and that doesn't include some travel costs, our own staff costs and some additional expenditure on hardware which has been written off against normal IT budget).

Now for some people, this will not sound like a particularly big expenditure, but for us it is getting really serious - our gross profit last year was just $480,000 on a revenue of $25 million. We simply can't afford to bleed money like this particularly in the current economic climate.

There is one other instance I want to write about that I've not mentioned previously. A while back we had a young lady consultant on site for a few days to cover a couple of items on FI/CO. She had not been with us before so wasn't completely up to speed with what had been completed. Apparently she had sent an email off to their project manager asking about something that was needed and was waiting a response from him.

She had then called to ask for me to to have a look at something with her - but when I arrived in the office that she was working in, she had gone to the ladies rest room. While I was waiting for her to return, a pop up appeared on her laptop with a response from her project manager. I don't normally make a habit of reading other people's email (which is why I haven't mentioned this before), but in this case I couldn't really avoid it.

Essentially the message said something along the lines of "Yeah, we've screwed up, that should have been done some time ago. Just BS them for a couple of hours, and we'll get someone to connect and make the necessary config change. They won't know any different". (Those are my words - the original were a little less polite). I was tempted to raise the issue, or report to our people, but decided not to - I've got to be honest tho', it really gets me mad when I think about it. (Particularly when they keep asking us to sign up with them for a support contract.)

I wanted to finish on a more positive note - yes, we do have those as well. About a month after we went live, we started to experience some issues with the system running very slowly. With the help of the SAP support portal and some training at an SAP center, I've identified a number of areas where they set the system up incorrectly. Changes were made to address these and as a result, over the last couple of months, we have had very few of these speed problems at all. In fact, many people have noted this.

Despite what many people might think, I can see that when the software runs well, it does in fact do what is needed (not necessarily what people want) and it can be very effective. Getting people to accept the changes is (certainly for us) a major task, but once they do get with the program, there are real benefits. We just have to try to make the most of these.

Reporting for duty

2010-03-26T13:42:00.001-07:00

Yes; it's been a month since my last post - the days just seem to fly by. We are already almost a quarter of the way thru the year and our SAP project has been live for 6 months. I really cannot believe just how fast the time has flown.

One of the big issues that we have had relates to the various reports out of the system. Things such as invoices, delivery notes, production notes, quality reports. Back at the beginning of the project, the various project team members produced a fairly long list of the different reports that we would need. I then went around them and got details of at least half as many again. These were listed on a spreadsheet, made available to the consultants along with a description of what data we wanted to see on the report. But unfortunately it wasn't quite enough.

You see, unlike a lot of other organisations, our staff tend to stay with the company a long whiles. The average length of service is actually over 8 years - we have some 29% of staff have completed 10 years or more, and 11% have completed 20 years. We have about a dozen people that have made it past 30 years and we even have a guy that started way back the day the company started and next year he will have achieved 40 years of service.

But this creates a bit of a problem - because so many of the key staff have been with us for so long, they have little experience outside of the company. This means that if they say they want a sales report, or an aged debtors list, or even an MRP report, they think that there is only one way to present this, and that they don't need to be specific in too much detail as everyone will know what they are asking for.

Of course, this is just not the case. These reports can vary enormously from company to company, and sometimes within a single organisation, the different business units will produce totally different reports to meet their own specific requirements. I'm not just talking about appearance, but the actual data, and the way that it is filtered and sorted in order to produce information that helps the business keep going.

So I made myself a nuisance by continuing to ask them to make sure that they had all of the reports listed and that they had an example available so that the consultants could produce something along the same lines. Some of these they actually did produce, but for quite a large number, the consultants said that we could make use of the standard reports / views within SAP.

There were several output documents that they did do for us - and they spent a long time preparing these. In total over 7 months and many were still not really right by the time that we went live. We've now had yet another guy in, and I have to say that this one really knows what he is doing. In a bit over 2 weeks, he has nearly cleared all of the outstanding issues on the existing forms. I would like to know why he wasn't available to us a year ago, as he could have saved us a lot of money and many hundreds of hours of wasted time.

In addition, our project leader and one of my staff have been spending quite a lot of time working on some other reports, mostly related to sales and manufacturing output, although there have been a couple of others. I've done a little bit on this myself, but really haven't had the time to do as much as I would want. Slowly we are starting to see some outputs that really add value to the software - but in many ways, it's like wading thru tar to get this done.

I've been querying a number of these reports - do we really need them? Of course, the answer is always an affirmative, the business will simply collapse without it. There was a classic example of this just a few days ago. One of the field sales people phoned up asking for a specific analysis of a particular range of products bought by a couple of customers over the past two years. It was pointed out to him that we don't have that much data yet and he went into a major panic declaring that it was absolutely essential that he have that report available by the following morning. In reality, it made little or no difference - he was just trying to justify his job, (because he hasn't made a sale since January).

There is no question that reports can be essential and the lack of them can be disastrous - equally, they can be nothing more than an exercise in CYA, and a complete waste of paper (and I really hate it when people print off meaningless reports). If people cannot get what they need, they turn to the trusty spreadsheet, and then we will be back to where we were some 3 years ago, with literally 10s of thousands of spreadsheet files stored all over servers and workstations, with people working on different version of the same file or creating their own.

For us, the spreadsheet was the worst thing ever invented - most of them did nothing to help the business, and in many cases they meant that we ended up with staff being employed to manipulate data, a terrible waste of manpower. It's recognised that we really needed to get away from this , and if we can get the rest of the reports sorted, there should be no need for these anymore. But I just have this feeling - too many people are wedded to the idea of the spreadsheet. I think that we are going to have to look at removing Microsoft Office from their computers!

A Patch in time

2010-02-28T01:23:00.000-08:00

Software engineering is a notoriously difficult discipline. You get the customers requirements, then write the code, only to find that they forgot to tell you something. You modify the code, then they ask for another change. You add that modification, but it doesn't quite work correctly - they gave you the incorrect sequence of events, or you made a spelling mistake. Each iteration of change brings you closer to the desired result, but then there is another problem caused by an external factor - a change in hardware, an updated driver that's not compatible, a new legal or regulatory condition.

So for as long as there has been software, there have been modifications to software. In the early days of mainframes, these were added directly to the code on the machine by the programmers. As PCs became more common, and more software was being produced, it became impossible for the programmer to make the changes and most users wouldn't know how to. So the concept of the patch came about - a means for the programmer to make a modification to code and then issue it to the end user, without having to completely re-install the software.

The biggest example of this of course is Microsoft. Back in the 90s, they developed a process of patching and slowly began to automate this to ensure that as far as possible, the end user PC would be protected against software faults of whatever type. This works well for the average user, but within a business, it can be a bit of a PITA. Imagine having 500 PCs all suddenly accessing the Internet to download the latest patches - it would cause a lot of problems with bandwidth. Now imagine the problem with 5,000 or 50,000 PCs.

Now we don't have quite that number, but it's still an area that we need to control. We looked at the Microsoft options for automated patching, but weren't completely happy. About 3 years ago, we found a software product that actually manages the patching process and does it very well - and not just for the OS, but for lots of other software products as well. It downloads a single copy of each of the patches and places them in a repository at each one of our sites, then automatically scans and updates the machines in a controlled way. We've found that it works very well indeed - and it saves us a great deal of time.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to add SAP into this process. It appears that they are developing a process for managing patches thru Solution Manager, but as our system integrator people didn't install it it, we've got a rather laborious manual process instead. We are at the early stage of setting up a Solution Manager system and I hope that we will be able to use it eventually, but it has to be fitted in amongst other tasks.

Now when the consultants first arrived nearly 3 years ago, they told us that they would have the first system (DEV) set-up and working within a week of the original project launch date ready for the BPOs (Business Process Owners) to start working on the sandbox client. They also said that the other 2 systems (QAS, PRD) would then be completed within another 2 weeks. Unfortunately, the initial project launch meeting was delayed by 2 weeks and they didn't start work on installing the DEV system for a further 3 weeks. This wasn't completed straight away and it was a further 6 weeks before it was ready for use. The other 2 systems weren't even started at that stage and in fact, neither was ready until about a month before our original go live date, some 9 months after the project launch.

At the time of the first delay, we didn't even have data in the QAS system, let alone the PRD system. As it had taken so long, I raised the question of establishing if there was a need for patching the software, but they just brushed the question aside. I did some research on the topic, and found out about the transaction SPAM (Support Package Application Manager I believe) - a rather unfortunate name for adding patches!

When I first ran the transaction, I wasn't really sure of what I was looking at - there seemed to be a number of green items in the list of applied patches, but rather a lot of yellow ones as well. After further research, I discovered a description of the process to add these items. It wasn't entirely accurate. but it was sufficient for me to turn most of the yellow items to green and I was rather pleased with myself. Unfortunately, the same process had to be carried out in each system - a lengthy process. But after several weeks, I had finally sorted all of the items out, including a update to the SPAM transaction itself and a kernel update as well.

It later turned out that the items in the list were just a series of patches that had been loaded when the systems were installed, but the guy hadn't completed the process. I then found that there were a lot more that hadn't been applied that weren't in the list. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to work out what patches are missing apart from looking at the patch number and searching on the SWDC (Soft Ware Download Center) of the SAP portal for the ones with the next numbers.

In the early part of last year, I started to download these patches - I then hit another snag. After a certain date, all new patches have to be confirmed before they can be downloaded. This has to be done within a Solution Manager system - as we don't have one, a bit of a problem. We have a way around this, thanks to SAP support, but this was the point at which I realised we would have to have a SolMan system.

As if that was enough of a stumbling block, a few months later, SAP introduced a new system of "Maintenance Certificates". These have to be downloaded in the same way as a normal license, but they only last for 3 months. If you don't have a valid maintenance certificate, you cannot apply a patch. It turns out that none of the consultants were aware of this, and I've since found that there are some SAP personnel that didn't know about it.

Despite all this, I started to get the patches applied to the systems. The DEV system was completed without issue right up to the last patch - but that then caused a problem. It turns out that the consultants had made a configuration change but neglected to advise anyone. Adding the patch caused a serious problem with a couple of processes. They said that they would fix it and tell me what they had done, but I heard nothing more. In the mean time, they asked that I not patch the other two systems.

Now that was about 10 months ago. I sat down recently and worked out how many more new patches have been issued and it is a heck of a lot. I know that some of them will only take about 10 - 20 minutes to apply, but others will take 2 -3 hours or more. I did test with one on the QAS system - it caused an issue. However, thanks to a response from the forum on the SAP Developers Network, I now know what is required to fix most issues that occur during the patching.

The problem is that I think we are now going to have to follow a very tedious process for many months to come. Each patch will have to be applied to the QAS system, wait to see if breaks anything and then work out what is needed to fix it before we try on the production system, This has to be fitted in amongst other jobs and the PRD system can only be done at weekends. As you can imagine, this goes down well with the family!

The estimate is that there is about 80 - 100 hours of work just to get the QAS and PRD systems to the same level as DEV. Probably 6-8 weekends if we are lucky and work evey weekend - however that will not happen, so it's more likely to take over 4 months. After that, then with a bit of good fortune, we may have our SolMan system running and we can see if there is a less labor intensive process.

Looking over the parapet

2010-02-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

When I first started as a junior manager, one of the more senior people made a comment to me - when you are working, every so often you need to lift your head up over the parapet to see what's going on. It's very easy to get tied up in the daily work and the various issues involved in that and forget to take a look at the bigger picture. So I thought that I would take a break from writing about the daily problems that we face on our SAP project and a take a more helicopter view. (Of course there is a chance that I could get my head shot off!)

Prior to 2006, each of the separate business units was operating its own systems - and there were a lot of those. Of course, this lead to problems - systems didn't integrate well (if at all), data was not transferable, they were awkward to manage and maintain and required considerable administration. Although the staff didn't see this, the were also costly to operate - in most cases, we had people employed just to manipulate data, without adding any value to the work that they did or benefit to the company.

The senior managers knew that this was an issue - some of the departmental heads also realized this (although most didn't and probably couldn't have cared less anyway). It was fairly clear that the situation had to change and that there was a prime case for an ERP system. The main arguments were straight forward - one time data entry instead of multiples, consolidated data processing, cost savings from reduced labor costs, and more agile response to market trends and customer demands. It was also thought that better and more informed decisions would be available throughout the business, streamling the decison making process. Eventually, the choice was made to go with SAP.

Over the past few years, I've read a number of books, white papers and various other materials - many say the same thing, that implementing SAP is a Business Change project not an IT project. I would totally agree, but would add that this is true for a lot of what we would normally refer to as an "IT Project". For example, we installed a new telephone system, an IT project, right? Wrong! - a business project as it changed the way that a lot of people worked. We've also installed a new WAN link and that must be an IT Project. No - again, it changes the way that things are done throughout the business so it is most definitely a business change project. In so many cases, there is an "IT project" but that is a smaller part of a larger business change project.

When the consultants organized the very first meeting, they gave a PowerPoint presentation which I still have. They made this very point about the SAP project being a Business Change project and there it is on slide 17, bullet point 3. Unfortunately, they didn't emphasize this and a lot of people still saw it as an "IT Project".

The problem is that so many people automatically assume that they are not involved in an "IT project" as it will be too technical, and immediately switch off. I suspect that happened to a number of the members of our project team. That did change eventually, and I think that most of the project team now accepts that it is not just IT. However, that is not the case for all managers and certainly not all staff. Far too many still see the project as purely an "IT Project" and treat it as such, and I think that this is an area where we have not done very well.

There is no question that we have tried to get everyone involved in the project - we've allocated resources, supplied relevant information, and provided the means for everyone to play with the Sandbox system so that they can learn about it. People are encourage to use the training materials to learn and make constructive criticism. Considerable efforts were made to ensure that everyone was involved - but depsite this, there are still senior managers, key users and other staff memebers that really don't know what they are supposed to be doing. No matter what we say, they still see it as an "IT project" and therefore nothing to do with them.

So what to do? I wish that I could answer that. Clearly it has to come from thetop, and the CEO needs to make sure that all senior managers are on board. It could be argued that we could have done a better job of communicating with staff. I won't accept that we haven't tried, but I woulkd have to acknowledge that we haven't gotten thru to everyone. I think that this will have an impact - without everyone at least trying, it will take longer to get everything working as it should do.

Unfortunately, I suspect that this will have an impact on our future use of SAP and will mean that we won't get some of the payback that we should - or at least, not as soon as we should do. But then, we are dealing with real people and this is a common issue for many projects and not just endemic to our company or SAP. People are creatures of habit and hate change - and there are those that will be atagonistic to any proposed transformation, no matter what the benefits. But then - that's life!

Just keep rollin' on

2010-01-23T09:48:00.001-08:00

I've not had time to post in the last couple of weeks. I wish I could say that everything is going well and life is calming down. I wish I could say that.

In fact the last couple of weeks have been pretty chaotic, with various problems. With the amount of time that has been taken up by the SAP project, a lot of other tasks have been pushed to the back, and I had hoped that now we are live we might be able to start getting some of these jobs done. In fact, the SAP work seems to be taking over all of the time that we have, and at the moment, we seem to be still fire fighting rather than being proactive.

Among the issues we have at the present are a large number of items that we have been waiting for the consultants to address for ages now. The system has suffered a number of crashes and some of the ABAP dumps have been collected and sent off for analysis. In one specific case, SAP support identified that the code had been changed and that they were not responsible for dealing with problems caused by personalised code.

I can understand that, but the reality is that we haven't changed a thing - none of our staff would know how to. I have a rough idea, but I wouldn't want to try to change anything at this stage. It's obvious that one of the consultants has made this change - the problem is, we don't know who, they won't admit to it, and they have kept no records of who changed what or why. There have been several other crashes that I have not yet sent off to SAP - I intend to do this on a regular basis as it seems it is the only way to identify what has been changed.

Here is a classic tale - I went into the sales office earlier in the week to look at a problem with one of the staff. Whilst she was talking to a customer, I was looking around the office and saw one of her colleagues hard at work. The person concerned had an invoice printed off on her desk, and was working in Excel. While I watched, she added a logo, some lines and started to put numbers on the page - then I realised that she was recreating the invoice in the spreadsheet. I had to ask what she was doing - it turned out that the customer needed the invoice but that it was coming out with the wrong amounts / values. The only way around this was to create a invoice thru Excel.

Back at the beginning of the project, we gave the consultants a list of the output documents that we needed along with samples and designs. They had 3 people working on this over an 8 month period and we still don't have all that we need. We have several that should give us similar information, but filtered and sorted in a slightly different way - but in fact give us completely different information. It also has to be said that we've found that we cannot rely on many of these documents as they just don't produce data that is even close to being correct.

Now to be fair, we do also have a problem of our own creation. We uploaded values for the sales prices last year just before we went live. However, we now find out that some of the prices uploaded were in fact incorrect - one of the sales staff responsible for dealing with certain key customers had given us the wrong data and we actually uploaded the incorrect values. That has been made worse as we now need to change those prices, and he should have given us the data for the beginning of the year. Instead we finally got the files on Monday - but with part of the data missing. He had gone through the data and removed all of the key index information so we now have no way to tie the new prices to the correct products.

I've also experienced a problem with our internal Project Manager - he has worked incredibly hard over the last couple of years. However, he has also picked up bad habits from the consultants. He has access to the profile "SAP_ALL" which gives him the permission to whatever he wishes. Now I have no problem with that in the development system, but not in the production system.

He was shown by the consultants how to unlock the production system and instead of making changes in the development system and then transporting those according to the correct SAP procedure, he has made the changes directly in the production system. This lead to a major problem as he had created a new transaction, but I couldn't assign to a role, as it didn't exist in the master system. On top of that, he regularly creates new SQL scripts and tests them in the production system and it causes problems for everyone else as the script is poorly written and ties up system resources. He just won't accept that what he is doing is wrong.

One other thing that I would note - in the past couple of years, I have had almost no contact with SAP apart the Support desk. Since Jan 1, I have 3 separate phone calls from different personnel at SAP. They seem really eager to sell me more services!

Happy new year...

2010-01-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

...to everyone - I hope that you had a great Christmas. I must admit that I have been taking it real easy over the last few weeks, but now at the start of a new year, it's time to start work again.

On this occasion, there is a topic that I particularly want to cover. I would suggest that it is actually relevant to a lot of projects, not just SAP. It will make the difference between a bad implementation and a good one - and between a good one and a great one. And the topic is...

Training!

I'm a great believer in training, and not just a brief run thru of "press button A, press button B" etc. Staff that are properly trained can identify when something is wrong and can fix a problem before it gets out of hand. Because they make fewer mistakes, they require less support which leaves us free to do the things that help make the technology work for the staff and the business. I believe that in the long term, money spent on training is an investment and pays off many times over.

Unfortunately, some of the senior management don't quite see it that way. Their view is that staff don't need to be "IT trained", just know enough to do their job. I can see an argument for not spending time on training someone on aspects that they will never work on, but I really feel that in the case of our project, we really needed to get more staff trained earlier and in more depth - doing so would have made them feel part of the process, and would have given them a sense of ownership that is partly missing.

However, there is also one particular area of training that I want to identify, and that is for the IT staff themselves. When we started, not one of the team had previously worked with SAP - we had some basic SQL skills and between us had worked with a number of products. To begin with, we were completely reliant upon the consultant firm for everything. They insisted in installing the software, and gave us some instructions in doing some of the tasks. They provided some material which they said was SAP standard training manuals as well as some other items that they created themselves - mostly powerpoint slides with a couple of screen shots and no explanation of what was being done or why.

Over the last couple of years, my team have worked hard on trying to learn the product. We had a go at doing an installation ourselves, and when it didn't work, we found a number of online resources that pointed us in the right direction. We also bought a ton of SAPpress books that provided some real good information and help. We found out how to perform upgrades and carried those out without any guidance. We also had some basic knowledge of problem solving and managed to identify some key items which meant that we were able to manage the systems ourselves without having to keep bothering other people.

But all thru that, I felt that we could have done better with a better knowledege of key areas. So I decided a while back to take a look at the SAP training courses. These tend to be a tad more expensive than some others, but not outrageously so - and there are a number of training centers about. However, I had heard a few comments from a couple of people that had attended one of these and what they said didn't make me feel too comfortable about it.

I decided that I would book myself on one course, just to test it out - I felt it would be worth $1500 for a 2 day course just to see for myself the real situation. I decided to go to an actual SAP training center rather than one of the others that were cheaper, as I though it would work out better, even tho' it was almost the other side of the country.

On the first morning, the course started with the trainer doing quite a bit of "housekeeping" - almost the first 40 minutes were about various aspects of the training arrangements, the course, the health & safety etc. I must admit that I began to feel that perhaps the training was just going to be "Death by Powerpoint". However, very quickly after that we got onto the actual material and then it became obvious that the course was well worth the time effort and money.

The trainer was an SAP employee of many years standing and very knowledgeable. He used some slides to illustrate process, then performed the task using an SAP system, before then giving everyone on the course the chance to do the work for themselves. Although he had quite a strict agenda to complete, there was opportunity for the trainees to ask questions - in almost every case he had the answer immediately. I gave him a couple of questions that he couldn't quite answer, but he then used the break periods to research the issue and then immediately after, he would cover the question in detail.

There weren't too many people on the course which was good from my point of view as it meant that we had plenty of support from the trainer. I also found it interesting talking to the others - they were all from completely different industries and backgrounds so there wasn't a lot of cross over, but even so, it was good to discuss how we all did things.

When I got back, I was able to use the new knowledge almost immediately. I spent sometime with a couple of the guys and went thru' some of the material with them - together we found an answer to a problem that had been bugging us for some while. I felt that there was no question, the course had proven to be a winner and I thought that it would be useful to get one of the others on a course as well.

The one that I chose for the second experiment was a full 5 days course - and there were a few comments from people about the cost. On the morning of the first day, the guy I sent phoned me at midday to say just how impressed he was with it and that he had already begun to learn stuff that answered many of the questions we had. After that, he called me virtually every evening to tell me that he had found out yet more things that we needed to know. When he got back, we discussed some of the issues, and it became very clear that these training courses would prove to be absolutely vital to us.

We now have several other courses booked up at the same center - I'm not going to take a chance on any other. The courses are spread out over a period of months so that we aren't trying to cram too much into a short period, and I'm trying to spread the courses amongst the staff so theat everyone gets a chance. I've even suggested that some of the other staff could go on a course - I've found one that would suit someone from the production team and they sound keen to go.

It could be argued, that we should have done some of this training last year or the year before, and that's possibly valid. But I would say that in my case, and that of my staff, we agreed that we found the courses so valuable because we already had a certain level of experience. If I had attended my course 2 years ago, it would probably not have been of the same benefit as I wouldn't have been able to tie the material in to the work that I have to do.

Ultimately, I suppose that it comes down to the individuals - some will obviously get more out than others. But having had a couple of the courses now, our team are definitely impressed with them and keen to do others to build on what we have learnt. It's important to justify the cost, and it may not always prove to be so beneficial. But for me, there is no question - money well spent and with the plans for the future, the company should benefit in both the short and long term.

It's the process stupid!

2009-12-09T12:44:00.000-08:00

One thing that everyone says about SAP - the processes can be long winded. However, you have to understand the reason behind that. The software was developed for use by very big companies and to meet the requirements of very restrictive legislation. As a result, many of the business processes seem to require more work than you would find in other software packages.

As I work primarily on the admin side, it's worth mentioning that the process of applying user access is particularly long winded. But there is very good reason for this - when you have 10,000 plus users, it is absolutely crucial to give all of these people the appropriate permissions. But working out what is correct can take a long time. And it has to be said that this has caused some friction amongst our project team.

Our basic AD permissions have been set-up over many years. They are not perfect by any means, but generally people have the necessary access and are kept out of those areas that they should not see. If we have to make changes, it usually only takes a few minutes and it is a pretty straight forward process that can be carried out by anyone in the IT team at any time during the day.

Unfortunately SAP is not so simple. A few months ago, I found out about Central User Administration (CUA), and we wll be looking to implement this at some stage, but at present we don't use it as it was not set-up at the beginning of the project. User admin requires details to be maintained in each system which is awkward and time consuming. The actual access permission is based upon a series of roles - permissions for transactions and authorisation objects are added to the role, and then user is placed in the role. A series of "transports" allows the roles to be copied between systems, so these should be the same in each of the systems.

However, the process is also designed to allow the change(s) to be made and then for these changes to be checked - first in the development system, then the test system, before it finally arrives in the production system. This is to ensure that any such changes are appropriate and don't do something that they shouldn't do. It makes a lot of sense and for the larger companies, I can see that this would be absolutely essential. For us, it is a very tedious process and we are not doing it as we should.

Unfortunately, even tho' the project team have been told about the correct process (repeatedly), they just don't get it. I've noted many times that I have been asked to allow a particular person to have a particular access permission - when I apply it, I've indicated that this then allows someone else within that role the same permission. We could have people able to do specific tasks that we would rather they didn't. After the first few months, I set-up a process to try to get these changes authorised properly. It sort of works, but even now people will try to bypass the process.

One other thing that I've noted - when we started, we set-up the roles based upon the job role descriptions that we use within the business. This was the advice from the consultants and I agreed that it made the most sense. However, having been doing it for some time now, I feel that we might need to look at this again as we have a lot of overlap in what various people do - the number of staff is limited, so most people actually do 2 or 3 "jobs". There is a good argument for changing some of the permissions so that instead of being applied to a "job role", we might have a "process role".

For example, we have sale clerks with various transactions, but there are a couple of these transactions that might also be requested for other people not in sales for various valid reasons - they could be used by accounts, by shipping, by purchasing, by production, as well as a couple of others. This is in fact, 15 roles in total. At the moment, these permissions have to be added to each of those roles, and after testing, they have the same permissions - potentially, we could have just 2 roles with those permissions, and then apply people to them in order to do the work and it would work just the same. Obviously, more work to set-up to begin with, but going forward, possibly much better as it would require less admin work.

Oh well, another day, another dollar!

Almost lost for words

2009-11-29T03:23:00.000-08:00

I don't like to hear people swear. You hear it too often - so called "celebrities", sports or music stars using language that would make a drill sergeant blush. Often, the argument is that they are just passionate about the specific view they are putting forward, but I feel that in reality, it shows a lack of intellect. They swear because they don't know how to convey a point of view. But despite my views, this last few days, I have done more than my fair share of swearing.

Let's go back to the beginning. Some 2 1/2 years ago, the consultants started putting in the SAP system. All they did was install the basic software and addons - they didn't apply any of the patches or updates. At the end of last year, they made a comment that it was for us to perform these updates. It took me a while to get the information that I needed, but in the early part of this year, I managed to carry out a process, to apply the patches that they had downloaded, but not actually put in place.

Subsequently, I went onto the SAP Service Market Place Download Center and found that there were a great many other patches that they had not downloaded. I started work on downloading these, but after I reached a certain point, a message appeared to say that all patches released after a certain date had to be confirmed through SAP Solution Manage before they could actually be downloaded. As they had not installed a SAP Solution Manager system, this caused some problems - however, I was able to get around this eventually. As SAP now require Solution Manager to be used, I felt that we should get it installed - we have a copy of the software and the existing license allows us to use it, so I saw no problem.

I got a copy of the relevant SAPpress book and downloaded some material on the product and its use - it became clear that Solution Manager offers a lot of other functionality that we would find very useful and from conversations, it seems that SAP are going to increase the requirements for running the product. So we've spent a little time in between other jobs, getting the software up and running.

Having finished this over the weekend before last, I decided on Monday to take a look thru the product. It runs thru the SAPGUI and looks much like the main ERP but with a few different menu items. I glanced at a few of these, not really going too deep into the various areas - but then I saw something that caught my eye. When I opened part of the menu item for Solution Manager, I saw the phrase "ASAP Focus".

Those of you that have been following me for a while will know that I had a brief exchange with Michael Doane (http://sapsearchlight.blogspot.com/2009/08/sap-implementation-projects-still-crazy.html), a consultant with many years experience of working with SAP. He described a methodology to carry out an SAP standard implementation called "ASAP" which he advised should be used by all system integrators (consultants). I had not heard of this and it appeared our consultants didn't use it. Michael was a bit frustrated (and I could see why) as this is supposed to be used by everyone.

And here it was - a full description of the processes, documents to assist, presentations, step by step guides, glossary, checklists, issue registers, and a complete roadmap for the whole implementation project. Basically everything that we could have used and would have found useful - instead we had to develop our own systems. The more that I looked at this, the more frustrated I became, and of course, I then started to really let rip with the bad language.

So now we are starting to look at getting the Soution Manager installed properly. We will have to get someone in that knows about it, and get one of our staff trained up. It's just a pity that it has taken so long to find out about the product. It would be interesting to see what the senior management from the consultants has to say on why they didn't use it, but I dare say that I will not be allowed to ask the question.

Belated happy thanksgiving everyone.

Where does the time go?

2009-11-14T04:13:00.000-08:00

I've just realised that it is nearly a month since my last update and about 7 weeks to the end of the year. Where does the time go?

We are still struggling with the SAP system, and now the consultants have all gone so we are very much on our own. We have a list of items that they still haven't gotten working, and our CEO spent over a hour on the phone to their director to try to get them to accept responsibility to fix these items, some of which have been on the issues list for 2 years.

I managed to resolve part of the problem with the invoicing - we now get the invoice run every day. At a meeting earlier in the week, our project manager said that this had totally fixed the problem, but after the meeting, he admitted that about half of the invoices are still not coming out right for one reason or another. Our finance manager did express some concern that without invoices going out, we won't have money coming in, and this could cause serious issues - we could potentially run out of liquid cash by the end of 1st quarter next year if the situation doesn't change.

In addition, it appears that there are a lot of jobs that haven't been invoiced at all - one of the guys did a quick check and it appears that this is actually an internal problem. People are completing a task, but it's not getting marked as complete, so the system won't process the job. Unfortunately, we can't just force it thru as there is no easy way to tell if the work has been done or not - it generally takes a couple of hours to confirm, by searching thru various paperwork.

There is still an issue with purchasing - jobs get re-scheduled, but the due date for items is not being adjusted correctly and several times, we found ouselves waiting for goods, or items were being delivered for something that has been put back acouple of months. It's more of an annoyance than a serious problem, but as part of the overall project doesn't make it look good.

The system is still not giving us many of the reports that we need. Various people were told to use different transactions, variants of specific reports etc. but many of these don't really seem to give us what we really need. Some of them seem to provide vey large amounts of data that is actually of no value what so ever. I had hoped to be able to spend some more on this during the project, but just never seemed to have the time.

As a result, I've booked one of my staff onto an SAP training course - it's way across the country at one of their actual training centers, and we want to see if the courses actually help; if they do, we may book some more. We do need to get better information about using the system, and we don't want to have to keep paying huge amounts every time we want to make minor changes. The courses are expensive, but if we get our people better trained, then it will prove worthwhile - having invested so much, we have to make the best of it.

Have to go, as we're off to visit my wife's parents - they're going on a cruise next week. Never thought that I would be envious of them!

Oh boy!

2009-10-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

I definitely spoke too soon... the question is where to start?

On Monday, there was a meeting about some of the deliveries. It appears that there is a big problem with some that have been sent out on the wrong dates. After considerable analysis, it appears that one of the processes used to check availability of products is re-setting any date that has been entered for delivery, and making it due 7 days after the inquiry. So a load of orders have been rushed thru production and despatched - but in a number of cases, they have arrived well before the actual date the customer wants.

In some instances, they have hung onto the products, but have asked that we accept delayed payment, and to keep them happy, we have had to agree to that. In a couple of cases, the product has been refused and we will have to re-deliver later on (in some cases, next year). Meanwhile, production are upset because they have had to do rush items and it has caused some scheduling issues.

To fix the immediate problem, the Sales Manager sat down with all orders and has gone back over each item and re-entered the required date. However, after his first attempt, one of his staff had gone back in to check the availability using the same process and once more, it had reset dates. As you might imagine, he was pretty pissed about it. They are now checking dates on all outstanding orders each day to try make sure that it doesn't happen again.

We also have a major issue with some stuff that was marked for export. The guy responsible asked for the items to be put on the system, but unfortunately, the overseas client had already placed the order - although the system is supposed to flag duplicate purchase order numbers from the customer, it still isn't doing so as I mentioned last week.

The goods were made twice and as they are non-standard items, we are not going to be able to sell to anyone else. It's cost us about $10,000 not including shipping. To make sure it doesn't happen again, they have developed a manual system of checking each order - at one point they asked if I could create an Access database to monitor the orders!

Finance are not doing well either. A consultant had set up a process for running invoicing automatically - but so far, it has only produced about 1 invoice in 10. The staff are trying to get the rest processed asap, but it seems to take ages just to do one order. They are concerned that if we don't get invoices out, we get no incoming money. I know that we have managed to maintain a reasonable level of cash flow previously, but that could change in a few more weeks if we are not careful.

A big problem has occured at one of our other sites. They were struggling anyway - people were taking too long to process anything at all. I spoke to the GM on site and he was getting really quite anxious - he did indicate that they might have to start turning away orders as they just couldn't get the work done.

This has been made worse as he has now lost all but two of his office based sales staff - they just upped and quit in the middle of the week, saying that they'd had enough. We've been asked to send staff to him to help out, and it is causing some major issues with arrangements. I did also hear that a couple of others have also indicated their intention to leave - this could get really serious.

One good thing tho' - a decision was finally made about the CRM system. After 2 years of work, it's been agreed that the SAP CRM doesn't meet our needs. The way that it runs is just too slow, and the sales people think that the interface is really nasty (it doesn't show what they need on the main screen). It also doesn't produce the information that our Sales Director said was a fundametal requirement.

We have had 4 different consultants workng on the CRM since the beginning - and basically, we have nothing to show for the time that they spent on the processes. The SAPGUI part runs OK, but they said that it had to be used through a web browser - and that was where the problems were. The speed of loading was really poor, up to a minute to move between screens at times.

Over the last 2 years, they have made all sorts of excuses - not enough memory, issues with SQL settings, AV products, the only thing they didn't blame was the phase of the moon! A while ago, they indicated that they wanted to get some more people in to work on the problems, but that they would want more money to do so. The CEO was not impressed - so he has made the decison to forget about the CRM, and the sales staff are happy with that.

The consultant company sent us some documents recently about arranging for support after the go live process. We are alreading paying for SAP support (close to $100,000 pa) and they want us to pay money to them as well. They won't actually come up with a price, but just give loads of .ppt slide with the "benefits" for having them as a support contact. From what I have seen, it could double our support costs - but there would be no reduction in our staff to compensate.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day!

Did I speak too soon?

2009-10-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

The first couple of days this days this week went OK - pretty much like last week. But then we hit some problems.

The issue with the documents printing out extra pages is still going on, although we have one of the consultants back in to help us. He's been looking at the specifics, but hasn't found anything so far. He originally suggested that we had faulty settings on the print server, but after making us double check it all, he had to admit that there is nothing wrong there.

On Wednesday, one of the staff in sales was putting orders on the system and suddenly realised that the prices were coming out incorrectly - she only spotted this as she has been doing the job for close to 15 years and can tell if a price is close or not, which these weren't. They spent the next 2 days checking this out but so far, no-one can see where it's going wrong. All we know is that the prices loaded were correct.

We also had a problem with the production plan on Thursday - for some reason several orders were entered twice (we haven't yet found out why) and this caused the production schedule to change to deal with an unanticipated demand. The system is supposed to detect if a customer's reference number is entered twice, but it didn't flag this up as it is supposed to do.

I've been busy with changes to user roles - I'm still getting just under a dozen a day. It's starting to get tedious, but one of the consultants said that this is quite common. He indicated that one project he was on had changes being made to the user roles every day 3-4 months after their go-live. I sure hope that's not the case with us as I have lots of other work that I need to be doing. Most of this is stuff that has been delayed because of the SAP implementation and we need to be getting on with catching up.

I've also heard some complaints from senior managers. They want specific reports daily / weekly and what they are getting is not what they want. We were told by the consultants that all of this was standard and they gave us transaction codes for reports - but it turns out that some of these don't actually give us what we asked for. One in particular is a report that indicates sales invoiced, but the figures that it is producing make no sense at all. We also had a labor report that seems to indicate that efficiency levels are about a quarter of what they were a few months ago.

On the plus side, people are starting to get to grips with the program. I don't get so many people locking themselves out because they entered the wrong password. They are still slow at using it though, but that's probably because they are still finding their way around; it's going to take a few months for them to pick up some speed. We had a few complaints about speed on a couple of occasions, but we were able to identify that someone else was running a report or other process that was tying up resources - hopefully, we have now put a stop to that.

In particular, we found some workflow items that had been set-up by a consultant that were failing every time they ran. We had run into this before and with the SAP support had found out how to correct this; we were able to do the same this time.

In addition, we had some feedback from the SAP Earlywatch check. They basically indicate that our systems have more than enough processing power / memory to run the program. This contradicts what the director of the consultants tried to tell us some months back (he insisted that we didn't have enough memory). They also made some suggestion about settings which we have now implemented, and some others about security permissions which we can't just yet.

My staff and I now have a basic routine in place to check on the system performance although I think we need a bit more experience to be able to understand the results better. Unfortunately, we have nothing to judge the results against - I have no way of knowing if we are doing a good job or not, or if the results are good, bad or indifferent.

Oh well, such is life. I suppose that these are mostly the types of teething problems that everyone gets with a new product.

Week 1

2009-10-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Here we go

2009-09-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Well, that's it. No more prevaricating, no more delays. Tomorrow is the day - SAP go live day. No further hold ups, no excuses. It doesn't matter if we are ready or not, here we go.

The last few weeks have been crazy - the amount of work, mind numbing. Everything else went out of the window apart from the SAP project. All calls from suppliers and cold callers were turned away - all meetings cancelled apart from the project team meetings. And the last couple of weekends, we have all worked our butts off, to do the best we can to make sure we are ready.

There have been a few issues with the data load - it started OK, but then one set failed and it took several hours to find the problem. It turned out that one of the consultants had made some changes in the Development system which had been transported to the Test system but not the Production system. As a result, the data load worked in one, but fouled up in the other. OK that got fixed, but we uncovered some more items like that which delayed the process each time. We started to get a bit worried - in the end, all of the static data is done, we just have a few items left to do, but they are live data items so can be loaded over the next few days. W also found that some pricing information was way out - a change had been made to some data, and no-one knew about it. A minor issue, but it held things up becase we had to find out why.

There was also an issue with some of the product information - the consultants had been asked to make a minor change to allow for a particular piece of data we need to allow us to report on in a particular way - they had done some work, but it was wrong and we only uncovered this when the production manager ran a report. It hasn't been fixed yet, but they say that they'll have a solution in the next 2 days.

There was also a bit of friction between finance and sales - the sales people had cleaned up their data, but left a load of customer information in as they wanted to be able to track marketing effectiveness. The problem was that when finance started to look at it, they found some companies that no longer existed due to M & A activity, plus some that have unfortunately closed due to the economy. I can see the problem from both sides and normally I don't think it would be that big a deal, but everyone is now getting very tense, so smaller issues get blown up out of proportion.

The consultants got a guy to do a check of the hardware and configuration to make sure it's all OK. He sent thru some suggestions for parameter changes which I did on Friday. I checked and all was fine - but first thing Saturday, I got a call to tell me the system had fallen over. I quickly restarted and it seemed all right, but thought I should go in to be safe - a good job too as it fell over again. I looked at the log and realised that it was referring to a problem with one of the parameter changes, the value they had given me was totally out. Having put it back to the way it was, everything carried on ticking over.

The project team have been doing a lot of data check and testing of processes, far more than the consultants said we needed, but not as much as I think we need. I'm not convinced that the guys have been able to test all of the different scenarios or variants - but there's no time left to do any more.

My eldest was invited to a party for a friends birthday - her father was throwing a barbecue, so after I finished yesterday, I dropped by. It was really busy and it was nice just to sit with a beer with the sun going down and not have to think about too much. However, I got talking to to guy that used to work for a company that installed SAP a few years ago. We compared stories and although it was an earlier version, and different consultants, it was a strangely familiar tale. I am glad that it's not just us - it may sound crazy, but it helps when you look at something that's wrong and you can feel that other people have been here before.

Any way, there we are. In total, we have spent just over 3 years on this project, just under 30 months of that with SAP. I haven't seen the final costs and I know that the FD is holding back a couple of invoices and he says he won't pay them to make sure that we don't get left without access to proper consultant support (although I suspect we might be better off going elsewhere). However, the project cost seems to be a little under $1.5 million for the consultants and software - we think that with all the work our people have put in, we have spent another $750,000. Has it been worth it? Only time will tell.

Going to get a good nights sleep - early start tomorrow. I'm not sure how I really feel about it, it almost seems to be unreal. I really don't know what to expect - I'm hoping it will go well, but just a bit afraid that it won't. Still it's too late to worry about it know, just got to get on and deal with it the best we can. I think that the coffee machine is going to be working overtime this week.

I'll try to post more over the next few weeks so that you can see how things turn out.

Data loading

2009-09-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

As you might guess, we are in the process of loading data into the production system, ready for the final tests before going live. The last couple of weeks have been frantic - we are just over half way there.

There have been a few issues - we had a big problem because the consultants hadn't transported a configuration change. The data wouldn't load and we had to wait for the consultant to process the change before we could carry on. There was another open issue for which they finally came up with an answer only for us to find that we had to modify the data load file in order to deal with this new item.

There has also been an issue with one of the tests - it's producing the wrong output figures. We are not sure why as in the tests in the test system, it worked fine. We are still checking this one out.

The guys at one of our other sites has also hit a snag. They wanted an output document for inventroy control - long term, they want a barcode on the paper so that we can use a scanner. Unfortunately, the document that they specified is producing completely wrong data; again we're not sure why.

In addition, there has been a problem emailing paperwork to customers / suppliers. It worked on the test system, but for some reason not yet discovered, it doesn't work on the production system.

Everyone is putting in a lot of overtime - we are all getting very tired and starting to make stupid mistakes. I think everyone needs to take a vacation after this.

The final stretch?

2009-08-22T04:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I had some contact with a guy that has been in consulting for a long time – he was kind enough to say some goods things about my writing, so I’ve decided to return the favor. Catch his blog here: http://sapsearchlight.blogspot.com/

One thing that I did find of interest; he referred to a process of project management that is supposed to be used by the consultants – ASAP (AcceleratedSAP I believe it stands for) also known more recently as Focus ASAP / ASAP Focus depending on where you get your info. He said “Outside of IBM and Accenture, all certified partners MUST adhere to SAP’s ASAP methodology, sometimes referred to (recently) as Focus ASAP. Most of these partners add some of their secret sauce to the core SAP methodology. I am willing to bet that if you look at this firm’s proposal of services to you that they make a big deal about their methodology.”

I did actually look thru all of the paperwork from these consultants – nowhere does it a make a mention of this. I asked around our project team to see if anyone had heard it cited, and the general answer was a definite “No” – apart from one person who remembered reading a reference to “Focus ASAP” in one of the SAPpress books that we bought a ways back. So I then thought I’d ask their Project Manager – unfortunately, he’s “not available” at the moment (I don’t know why) and we are not sure when we will next see him. I approached one of the other consulting staff and asked the question – the response was along the lines of “Oh that was used about 10 years ago, but no-one uses that anymore, it’s a really horrible system”. Interesting?

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As you may imagine, things are hotting up. For many people the project is starting to get real and you can sense the panic growing. I’ve had numerous project members and departmental heads speak to me and even a couple of the board expressing their concerns. We have no formal contingency plans other than those that I and my IT staff have discussed. We are committed to go-live and nothing will stop or delay that now.

A major problem was uncovered in the last week that has created a lot of bad feeling. As I’ve indicated, we trade across borders so use multiple currencies. We suddenly found that all of the customers had a default currency set and that this overrode any attempt to set the right currency. The initial suggestion was that the data was wrong – a quick look at the files showed that wasn’t the case. So we were blamed for loading it incorrectly, but that was quickly disproven.

Eventually, it turned out that the consultants had set the appropriate configuration in the test system, but not in the production system – thank goodness we found it before we started issuing invoices. They blamed us first for not raising it as an issue – however we did, over a year ago and could prove this by referring to the list of issues. They then said that the various departments hadn’t tested the process correctly – they had, but obviously not in the production system. No matter what we showed, they still tried to maintain it wasn’t their problem. And I’m betting that after we go live, all of the problems we then find, they will say the same thing, no matter what the problem.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some travelling to the other sites (partly why I’ve not been adding to the blog) and I’ve heard of some other stories of SAP implementations going on at the moment. What is really surprising is that they are being marketed as successful, and yet from what the people on the ground are saying, they are anything but.

In one case, its being run by one of the Big 3, the others are smaller operations with smaller consultancies. Not one has come in on time, not one on budget, not even close. In each case, it seems highly improbable that the organization concerned will ever see the ROI that they wanted or were promised. At the biggest one, they went live last year and they were expecting some significant reductions in staff because of efficiencies, but instead they have had to take more staff on in order to manually process items because the system isn’t working right. And in that particular case, they’ve outsourced the data center which they expected would save them nearly $1 million a year – the local paper has found that the outsourced costs have increased their bill, not decreased it.

Well enough for now – I expect that over the next few weeks, I’m going to be very busy, so I may not have the time to keep you updated on progress. However, I may try to post a few short items if I can just so that you see how things pan out. What ever happens, many thanks to you all for reading this and for the great comments - they have been really helpful and I hope that I can return the favor one day.

I've got a bad feeling....

2009-08-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

Things at work have started to get very tense - people are now starting to realise that the go-live date is getting closer. There are still so many items that have yet to be fixed up, and despite all the effort, it seems that many of these will not resolved in time. So the decison has been made that we will go ahead whatever the cost and live with any issues.

No doubt, many of you that read this will have heard similar stories to the ones that I have heard - about projects that suffer problems. I see it almost like a slow motion train wreck, and there is nothing that I can do.

The PM from the consultants was in the other day - he was supposed to be spending time with the finance people to go thru the closing of period / month / year. When he discovered that they didn't have the right transaction code, he didn't try to resolve the problem or ask me to deal with it - he just logged on as himself and added SAP_ALL to their user accounts. For those that don't know, SAP_ALL is a profile that when it is added to a user account gives that user full administrative access to the whole system.

I found out about this a few days later when I was making yet more changes - to my horror I found that some 25 accounts had been modified to give them the same access level. I've been told that this is needed because they no longer have time to waste and need to get these processes working and that we will fix it all up about a month after go-live. Call me cynical, but I suspect that won't happen and I'd give 50 bucks that they still have the same access level at the start of next year.

I also spotted something earlier - we have yet another new consultant on site to address a couple of specific issues. I wasn't told about this until after he had been there 3 days. I queried how he had been doing any work and was told that he was using the account of one of the other consultants - in addition he has created duplicates of the accounts our project team members use, and he has been using these to test things; but as they haven't been added to specific roles, he just added SAP_ALL.

In addition, it was highlighted that another consultant has been modifying some items - he has made a mess of it and now that item doesn't work at all. They've gotten someone else in to address the issue, but it appears that it will take 3-4 weeks to fix.

There was a review meeting earlier - as we went around the table, it was identified that one of the senior managers wasn't there as he is away on holiday. A comment was made that it was unacceptable that this key person should be away at such a crucial time. It was pointed out the person concerned is on his honeymoon - it was booked up 18 months ago before the date of the go-live had been put back so many times. In addition, the person concerned has had very little training - I think I am the only one that has spent time with him at all (altho I might be wrong). Certainly, he has actually had very little input into the project.

What happened then was astonishing - I tried to point out that this was a bit unfair and one of the directors started shouting and threw his notepad across the table at me (I suppose that I should be greatful it wasn't his laptop - no doubt I would have had to repair it). The rest of the meeting was extremely uncomfortable as you might guess.

I could post more, but just don't feel that it's worth while. I suppose that when it goes belly up, then they will be demanding that I wave my magic wand and fix it all in 10 minutes. I made a point of reading Rudyard Kiplings "If" - I think that it has a lot of resonance for those of us in IT, even tho it was written some 100 years ago.

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

Busy, busy, busy....

2009-07-26T07:19:00.001-07:00

I was going to write something last week but just couldn't make the time. It's been pretty hectic this week as well.

Part of the problem is that we have to do the SAP work at the same time as our normal tasks. We have to maintain hardware, patch software, keep the AV running, check backups, hold people's hands when their printers don't work etc. In addition, we have a 5 year development plan that gets updated every 6 months or so and we try to make sure that we stay on track. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been some changes to buildings and we were moving hardware around, doing some cable patching etc. This is straight forward if it is planned out - however, some of our managers think forward planning is deciding what we will have for brunch!

The SAP data loading has started - I've made the point to people several times that now this has started, we can't really delay the go-live date. Of course if necessary we could, but it would cause a large number of problems. However, we want to concentrate their minds and make sure that they understand the importance of the process. Despite this, some still haven't gotten with the program - we loaded some price information only to be told a day later that they wanted to make some changes!

Now I did the intial tests of the loading process way back and setup the scripts to import data. One of my staff was put in charge of the data assembly and he's done an excellent job. He's also tested the script in the test client to make sure that it should all run OK. So when we started the load process in the production system, we expected it to go well - and for the most part it did. Unfortunately tho' we hit a couple of snags.

For those that don't know SAP, you have 3 systems, Development, Test and Production. In those you have "clients" - effectively instances that can be run separately. One of these is designated the master client and all changes are made in there - then a system of "transports" move the configuration changes so that all systems are the same. It turns out that several of the consultants have been making changes to the configuration, but then haven't transported it to the production client correctly. Worse, they didn't even put the changes in the master client, so any transports will over write what they've done. We've had to go thru and sort these out as we find them, which is slowing down the load process - so lots of late nights and weekend working.

On top of that there are still a large number of outstanding issues, and one of these is to do with the finances. Apparently the consultant for that area told the project manager that he was intending to deal with it after go-live. I wish I'd been there to hear the rest of the conversation!

We still haven't gotten the labeling issue totally resolved and the PM wants one of the consultants back on site to deal with this. They've complained that they wanted to deal with this a few weeks ago, but couldn't as we were dealing with other matters. They can be a real PITA at times - we have to wait what seems an eternity for them to get back to us, but when they finally do, they expect us to leap into instant action at a single word.

I'm still waiting to find out what they intend to do with the CRM - it still runs very slowly and there are numerous parts to it that don't meet our needs. The sales director has indicated that if they don't get it fixed soon, he will make the decision to toss the project. As far as he is concerned, he would rather that we use the existing product as that works. We can't link it to SAP, but that doesn't bother him.

Several of the project team have started going back over the training with their staff - I've been suggesting that they should do this for months as most staff have forgotten everything they were told. There were a couple of sessions last week - of 19 staff in training, 3 could remember their password, the others all had to be reset! However, once they went thru the basics again, they stated to recall some of the steps. Unfortunately, I don't know if we are going to be able to get everyone back in the training room. We'll just have to wait and see.

Onward and upward!

And it's all gone quiet

2009-07-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks – well, that’s mainly because not a lot has been happening. So I thought that I would go back in time a bit, and cover some of the main issues from the early days in a bit more detail.

We had a launch meeting over 2 years ago now (unbelievable how the time has flown) and it had been agreed that at that meeting, the consultants would discuss the various steps of the project, and it was expected that we would come away with a clear idea of what had to be done, who was to do what jobs and have a timetable that we would all work to. Well, that WAS the plan.

I still have my notes from that meeting – one of my first points was that the agenda that they put up on the screen was not the one agreed with the project manager. In fact, it only had 4 bullet points on it – nothing else at all. When you consider that this was for a meeting that was expected to last all day, I felt that it was a bit light on detail.

I also made a couple of other comments after about 30 and 45 minutes – “when is he going to get down to it?” You see, the meeting was being managed by the director from the consultants, and he was doing most of the talking. That first hour, he did a LOT of talking – but at the end, I had no notes as he had not covered a single item that was actually relevant to the project plan. I could see that a couple of our senior managers were getting restless and the CEO left twice to take phone calls.

We broke for coffee at 11:10 – my real notes by that time were on 5 lines although I had some real nice drawings, none of which had anything to do with the project. During the break, our CEO and the consultants’ director got together and I’m told the CEO told him to move the pace up a bit. But it has to be said that by lunch, we still hadn’t really any better idea of what the project plan was. My favorite part was when the guy turned to the CEO and suggested that we ought to have a few bottles of champagne to get the project off to a good start – of course I had to speak up and suggest that perhaps champagne might be more appropriate once the software was actually running. Funny that he and I have never got on since.

After lunch, we were back to this guy talking on and on without actually making any real positive comments that would have been of any value. Later, just before the afternoon coffee break, he allowed their project manager to say a few words. This guy did actually discuss the timetable – but took no more than 20 minutes. Essentially, he stated that there were to be 6 key milestones (there were more, but he only referred to the 6) and he gave the dates for those, one of which was the meeting we were at (10 days late already) and the last one was for the go-live date.

By the end of the day, all we really had was a very basic timetable showing the start and finish with the “blueprint” phase, acceptance of this, the data cleansing, data loading and cutover to the live system. The idea of data cleansing had been briefly covered, but in very limited detail. I had suggested that we should start this as soon as possible as I knew we had a lot to do – this was brushed aside and in fact it didn’t start for a further 4 months. I should highlight that we are now some 18 months on and today it was found that one particular set of data still hasn’t been corrected and won’t load in its current state even though it has been sent back to the relevant department 5 times.

It was a further 2 months before most of the project team even really began to know what was expected of them; none of their responsibilities had been discussed and nothing was down in writing. I know that I can be a bit anal, but for me this so important. People have to know and understand what is expected of them – most won’t make notes, so I feel that writing it down so that they can refer to it is a must.

If I were to ever be involved in something like this again, I know that my priority would be to make sure that the launch meeting set the tempo for the project – that within 30 minutes, everyone would know exactly what was expected of them as individuals and of the team as a whole. We would have clear definition of responsibilities written down, with due dates and standards expected.

I think it a shame that the experience that I have gained from this project will never be used to make another project more effective – that is partly why I’ve been writing this blog, as I hope that other people might come across it and find it of value. The skills that I have gained have come at a high price in terms of workload and frustration and it should be possible to help other people avoid this. Certainly from what I have seen, the consultants have learnt little from it and are most likely to repeat the same errors, over and again.

Oh well, back to the grindstone.

The seconds tick away…

2009-06-28T01:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve indicated that the company has a number of sites in this country as well as several more overseas. The original plan was that we would implement the SAP program and once it was proven to be working, it would then be rolled out to the other sites. There was a slight change to this in that we bought out a company in another country and for a while, it was required that they would be part of the project; that was cancelled, so we are back to just the original sites.

It should be highlighted that each site sells different products – yes there is a commonality, but the difference is sufficient that they use diverse processes. Now in the past, this has caused an issue – it’s been difficult to get any agreement on standardization - this is why we wanted a single ERP system.

When the project was set-up, the consultants suggested that we create a project team made up of managers to represent the key areas within the business. It was decided that our director of operations would head the team and act as project manager from our side; he would liaise with the project manager supplied from the consultants.

So far, so good - however, I queried one thing; most of the project team were from the one site, and there was only one representative for the other 3 sites. The explanation for this was that as we would all use the same processes, the one person plus a single consultant was required due to a specific area which they dealt with and that the other sites didn’t. I understand the idea of this, but I felt that this was not right.

Although we need to try to get some consistency, the nature of the differences in the way that each site works is fundamental and many of the business processes are then affected by this. I was concerned that we would see the system set-up to work one way only and that the other sites would then struggle to use a system that could not handle their particular needs.

After the blueprint phase, I was even more convinced that the one person would not be able to deal with all of the issues on his own. As we moved through the next steps, it became obvious that he was struggling to keep up. About 16 / 17 months ago, it was decided that he needed help and he has had 4 more people helping him, 2 on a temporary basis and 2 permanently. Despite this, I still felt uneasy – they were still concentrating only on certain key steps and ignoring other modules on the basis that the project team would cover those items.

Now over the past 8 / 9 months, the guys and gals from the project team have worked extremely hard to train people from the other sites. During this phase, there have been a number of questions raised by the people being trained about the way that they are to work in future. Some of these questions are not really relevant – we have been able to simplify some processes and things that they used to do are no longer necessary. But unfortunately that’s not so in each case and there are a number of key items that are absolutely required that still have yet to be set-up properly.

And now it gets worse. Our project manager went to one of the other sites 2 days ago to meet with the managers from those other sites. He showed them a PowerPoint Presentation and then ran through a demo of SAP using some data that they would recognize so that they could see that it worked. He told yesterday that the presentation went well and that these managers are now really happy with it and they all feel very positive. The presentation lasted a total of less than two hours.

I queried if these managers had actually used the software themselves – the answer was no. He sort of said that they wouldn’t be the ones to use it, so it wasn’t important that they knew the software, but that they should understand what it could do.

I have to disagree – the people concerned are the site director, who needs to be able to get sales data, the production manager, who needs to know how to schedule and manage the production, the sales support manager who will have a major task in ensuring that products are produced, packed and shipped on time, and one of the senior managers that is involved in ensuring key accounts are dealt with correctly. I know that of these guys, 2 have never logged on to SAP, the others have logged on, but neither has used it in the last 6 months.

Although he has said he is confident that they are happy with things now, that is not what I am hearing from other conversations. I really am concerned that these senior managers are now completely out of the loop – and worse, because they don’t understand, when the staff have problems, these managers will not know what to do or how to find a resolution.

At this stage, we are committed to a go-live date – the CEO has said that we will not delay any further under any circumstances. If it is not ready, it is not ready but we will just have to make do with it in the condition that it is in. (I actually believe that there is now some political pressure from somewhere being applied to force the project forward whatever the cost.) Whatever the truth, I do see that sometimes it is necessary to force the situation, but I am troubled that there are too many pitfalls and things may get ugly. Time to clean up that old fall-out shelter!

Thru a glass darkly

2009-06-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me that when writing these posts, I've fallen in the same trap as a lot of people; I make assumptions that the readers will know certain things about SAP that I don't need to elaborate on. So I thought that I would clarify a few issues.

SAP is an acronym - Systems, Applications & Processing. The title was originally in German, but it works the same in English. It is both the name of the company (SAP GmbH or SAP Inc etc.) and it is also the name of the software product that the company produces. Normally, it is fairly clear which of the two is being referred to, but just occasionally, it can be a bit confusing.

The company is a global player - they operate in almost every market area of the world. Previously, due to the size, complexity and cost of implementing their product, they concentrated on selling to the larger organisations. However, some years ago, they realised that there were a lot more smaller businesses out there than larger ones and so changed their focus somewhat - they now try to sell to all sizes and type of organisations.

The software is a massive product, with many modules covering different areas within a business. It is intended to be a true Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product; that is, it allows data from all areas of a business to be handled and processed in order to allow a seamless transition of data and therefore much greater accuracy of processing and transparency of data for analysis. This has previously been of real importance to the larger operations, but is becoming equally important to the smaller ones that wish to compete on a equal footing.

So far, so good. However, now it starts to get a bit more complex. You see, SAP (Inc) don't actually do most of the selling of SAP (product) . Yes they have a massive marketing budget and teams of specialists that help in the selling process, but the majority of the selling is really done by other companies; and these are the ones that also (generally) do the implementation of the product. These can be smaller companies operating in a single country or larger one that operate across a global region - it could also be one the big boys such as the major consultancies. This actually also includes people such HP & IBM who are surprisingly active in this area.

Now there are people out there that will tell you that SAP (the product) can operate "out of the box". I know what they mean, but in fact that is a very simplistic statement and in reality is simply not true in the way that say Microsoft Office would work out of the box. From my experience, I can say with utter certainty that the software installation is not a just case of putting a CD / DVD in the drive (they actually supply a large box full of over 100 discs!). In order to carry out even the most basic of installations successfully, you need to know certain things about the product and your business before you start. Even then, there are a number of factors that could prevent an installation taking place at all.

In order to use the product effectively, it also needs to be set-up - SAP (the company) refer to this as "best practice". What they actually mean is that over the years, they have developed a series of modifications and changes to meet the needs of the larger businesses that they have installed the product in. They have a wide range of these based upon sector and process type; they can select which of these to install on a "mix and match" method. This requires a good knowledge of the product AND of the business - and I would suggest that this one area is responsible for many of the problems that occur during implementation.

Now it gets even murkier. In some of the consultancies, the people that work for them are employees, but many are only on short term contracts - say 18 months to 2 years. These consultancies will hire people for the specific project based upon need and skill. Unfortunately, many of the people hired are of varying quality - and in some cases, they end up working in a module area that they are not particularly skilled in. I've also seen that the consultancy can hire in a person who is in turn a private contractor, and these generally get paid by the day or week. I also understand that in some cases, the larger consultancy contracts out part of the work to a smaller firm. And of course, the smaller firm can then hire in the actual people, who might even be employed by yet another business.

You see, some of these consultancies specialize in specific areas - HR, Accounts, or groups of modules such as those that make up the manufacturing process. The concept is fairly sound - you hire in the expertise in the area that you have the need. This allows you to act as a consultant even if you don't have the required specialization.

But with all of these different people, using different employment methods and structures of reporting, you find communication problems even in the relatively simple projects. From experience, many of the individuals like to work in particular way and use specific methods or practices - in some cases, these clearly don't meet the specific requirements, and I've seen that they often go against the defined goals.

Now, for a lot of people, this will seem a strange way of working - but you have to understand that this is the SAP business model. They are NOT in the business of selling software - they actually want to sell the knowledge and experience of the consultants, either as business consultants, project management, training, education services - basically all of the additional items that are perhaps a bit harder to quantify.

Don't get me wrong, when the software is set-up properly, it seems to work well (if perhaps a bit long winded). However, I would suggest that the way that the product is sold and then managed is almost designed to lead to issues that will then require the hiring of additional outside expertise. The problem then of course is that often people get locked in to the product - no-one (especially in senior management) wants to admit that they might have made a mistake, so they act like the gambler who keeps on playing in the hope that the one big win will cover all his losses.

Our project is one of the less expensive ones - we've spent nearly $2 million so far after 2 years and based upon some of the comments and observations, I expect that we will see an annual expenditure of another $100k to $150k for the next 5 years in addition to any contracted support cost (which was hiked from the beginning of the year). I still have a copy of the original documents - they stated categorically that the total cost over the first 5 years would be $1.06 million and this covered all installation costs, support and consultancy.

In reality, we will probably have spent around 3 times as much by the time that we are finished. I did some basic numbers and to get the return that they suggested, we would have to continue to use the product for around 18-20 years, and that doesn't allow for any subsequent changes or projects. I have to be honest, I cannot see that we will ever actually get a return on our investment - it's just going be a big old money pit.

It's a lovely day...

2009-06-14T03:26:00.000-07:00

....for sitting in the sun, maybe move into the shade a bit later, and share some bread & wine with the family and just generally enjoy a very pleasant weekend. Maybe a barbecue on Sunday?

However, part of the time I've spent doing some SAP related work. I discovered a minor issue on one of the servers - not enough to cause a big problem, but I want to try to eliminate any of these little errors before we go live - I think that we'll have enough to do once we achieve liftoff.

Now the actual SAP global support people are pretty good for the most part - the method of reporting errors is a bit of a pain at times, but once you get someone on the case, they've shown that they can get things done. So far, they've managed to fix almost all of the issues that I've raised - the biggest problem I see is trying to identify the correct function area for the problem to be listed under and they can be a bit sharp with you if you enter the wrong data.

On this occasion, it's actually been passed through 3 different support people - as each one has looked at it, they've suggested that the problem is caused by something different. The last one has asked me to carry out yet another set of upgrades. As has been indicated, my staff and I have had very little real training and the instructions that we received were so vague that they proved to be of little value. I have however been given the email address of a guy in Germany that is prepared to help - he writes / speaks pretty good English (a good job as Ich verstehe nur ein bission Deutche!)

The information that he provided for how to download and carry out the upgrades was not perfect - however, after reading and checking the information carefully, I have been able to use it to work out the correct procedure. I've also been able to create my own training document on how to do this specific task so any of my guys could do it if I'm not available. For me it's important that we don't rely on any single person's knowledge - it's too risky and I've seen companies that suffered because they were stuck when a key employee left them.

So on Friday, I managed to get the test system upgraded to the latest relase of the kernel. I actually am quite surprised that it went so well - prevously, the work was done by one of the basis people from the consultants and we had all sorts of problems both during and after the work was done. On this occasion, the update worked so well, that I just couldn't believe it. I literally spent about an hour trying to find a problem before I was prepared to think that maybe it had completed successfully. I then carried out the upgrade on the other systems after everyone had finished for the day and by late on Friday, it was all done. Subsequently, I carried out a system transport of the use role profiles. Again, it all went quite well, so we can start Monday with a freshly patched system.

Now this may not seem like a big deal - for many people, patching and updates are a pretty simple process and one that most users don't see too much of. Within the company, we run an automated patching solution for all of the PCs and servers that takes care of the OS, the productivity suite, and most of the other software products we use and that has saved time and money over the years. It also ensures that as far as possible, we are protected against malware - an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

But for me, the ability to be able to this work without having to rely on the outside consultants is a major step forward. I don't think that I can understate just how much better that makes me feel - stupid I know, but having been thru such a long process with so many problems and so many failed areas, this is a real achievement even if it is such a small success. Now this doesn't mean that finally all is well - I wish! But at this point in time, I'm prepared to take anything positive that I can find and use.

So now, the work is done - time to relax and feel good about having finally achieved something positive. Now if we could just get the rest of it working the same way.....

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BTW, I see that I have a couple more followers - welcome to you all. I hope that you enjoy reading my comments, and find them of some value. I will keep on writing as things happen; I think that we are now pretty committed to going live later this year (but more on that next time) and I will continue to detail what happens after the big event. So keep watching...

Another 2 cents worth..

2009-06-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

Uhhmmm...

We had another meeting yesterday - the director from the consultants arrived with a new guy in tow. Introduced as our new CRM consultant - however, we did some investigation and it turns out that he last did CRM some 5 years ago with version 4 of the product. Since then, he has acted as PM for most of the project he worked. So he seems like a really sensible choice (not).

During the meeting, the director from the consultants said that the new guy would be spending about 10-12 days on site to get an idea of what our requirements were. Excuse me.... what have they been doing for the last 2 years? Un - believable.

Now we were promised at the previous meeting I referred to, they would carry out a demonstration using a customer's system to show that the product works. (That was actually supposed to have been done about a week ago.) However, that still hasn't happened yet - and in addition, they said that they are now setting up a test system for us to see, and they want to make sure that it is OK before they do the demo so it will be another couple of weeks. Color me crazy, but I would have expected that to happen before we bought the damn product, not two years into the project and certainly not a couple of months before we are due to go live.

I have to say that I think the director from the consultants is so full of BS that he could fertilize the Sahara. If he told me that the sun rose in the East, I would want to get up at midnight to check it out for myself, before I would actually believe him. The funniest bit was his insistence that we are on target - we are now actually well over a year behind, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for him. He also tried to say that it's within budget - but not according to their documents, which I still have a copy of. We are in fact over spent by 3 times the original figure they quoted for a 5 year write off - and we had identified at the time that their figure were incorrect as they didn't include several key expenditures.

When I left the meeting, I just wanted to explode.....

The same consultants are also working on another project and occasionally, they can't get to us because they are on site with the other company. They started this project way before ours - not sure just how much longer it's been running. This other company went live back in the new year - I tried to contact them, but their IT manager wouldn't discuss the project with me (they had been told not to I think from the sound of it). Since then, one of our sales staff spoke to one of theirs - and they got the woman's number for me to call.

She's fairly new in the job as it appears they have lost quite a few sales staff because of the project - and she made it clear that she doesn't want to stay long either. She made some comments that no-one really seems to know how the system is supposed to work and they get all sorts of problems during the day which take ages to resolve (she referred to one problem that took 3 days to fix and they lost a huge sale because of this). Their sales people are really fed up with all the wasted time - and it also appears that they lost a couple of IT staff as well which has made the problem much worse.

I've also had a contact with another company (different consultants) - they have only implemented part of the SAP system so far - sales, purchasing and accounts. One of our people went to see them and talked about how they were getting on - they seemed to be doing OK, so it shows that it can happen. But they have also indicated that they are still getting issues - it appears that they had a problem with getting the invoicing correct. I'm not sure exactly what their problem was, but it sounds as if it was applying the wrong pricing. This is something that can happen to any company and I would suggest that most systems have done that at one stage or another, so it would be unfair to highlight this as if it was just SAP.

But even they said that the process had been painful and they were not entirely happy that they were getting all of the benefits that they expected. Questions have been raised about the cost of the project and it seems unlikely they will realise any actual savings for their investment.

Someone made a comment that bad news travels faster than good news - true and I accept that many big project fail somewhere along the line and I'm sure that there are some SAP projects that are models of success. But for me this has been by far the worst project I have ever been involved in by a long way - I've worked with some really astute business people in the past, and I know that they would have demanded heads to roll for a failure a bad as ours has been. I really can see the ax swinging at some stage - and I'm concerned that my guys and I will suffer as a result.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day...

Another day, another dollar

2009-06-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

We had another meeting today, with just one question – "why are we still no closer to go live than we were before the New Year?" I put forward my list, the same one that I have kept since around last June; of the items listed, only one has actually been resolved. Their project manager spent about 15-20 minutes going thru the points, but at the end the only real answer for all the issues was “it hasn’t been done”. For what it’s worth, my list was actually one of the smallest – there are still over 300 items on the open issues register.

Now I will accept that my list is the only one that hasn’t actually been growing in the last 12 months – all the points I raised have been around since then at least. Of my colleagues, most have discovered more issues as we progress through the various parts of testing and correcting. However, about half of the items have been on the list for at least a year – we know because we recorded the date entered against the item. More than a few had been marked as fixed, only for us to find that they were not, or for other changes to have broken them again.

At the end of the meeting, we had actually achieved very little. Once again, lots of promises, but nothing to back up what they say. People were very quiet coming out of the meeting; in the past, they had grouped together to bitch about the lack of progress but this time, almost everyone just went off back to their departments without a word.

The FD was in one of his moods after the meeting. He wanted to talk to me because a decision has been made that wasn’t discussed. As I’ve indicated we have sites overseas – one of these was supposed to be going live shortly after us. To make that happen, we had planned a lot of changes to provide the infrastructure, most of which are now in place. It appears that this has all been pretty much wasted – the directors have decided that we will continue with the SAP project, but it seems unlikely that we are going to roll it out across the group for at least 3-4 years, and possibly not even then. (But this isn’t generally known just yet)

He showed me a document that detailed the consultant fees for that overseas site (not the same group that we work with, a different company) – just under $180,000. Apparently, the work they did was of no value as it didn’t match the site requirements, our group requirements or meet the needs of our consultants. It appears that we have no possibility of getting our money back – the company that these consultants worked for is in the local equivalent of chapter 11 and it seems probable that they will simply cease to exist.

Now I know that there are people that will say, “$180k is not a great deal for an SAP implementation” – true and I know of a company that spent $30 million, but we couldn’t afford to spend even a small part of that kind of money. To put it in context, our total group profits for the last 10 years was just over $30 million. We have a great product and excellent service - we retain a lot of customers for this reason. But we cannot justify spending that much money unless we get seriously improved efficiencies and I doubt we will see a return that will be even close.

What makes me really mad is that I have a small project I’m working on; it won’t get us any extra sales as such, but we can see the potential for better analysis to make us more labor efficient in one area and that might get a few more sales. The cost of the product? - $2495 plus tax, and this includes a half days training. However, I am having to again justify spending the money even tho’ I put it on my budget before the start of the financial year.

What’s really getting people pissed is the director from the consultants – he turns up having flown to the local airport, takes part in a 2 hour meeting then back to the airport for another flight. He promises much, but so far has delivered zip – everyone calls him the seagull, because he flies in, makes a loud noise, craps on everyone then flies off!

Better sign off – I’m waiting for a response from Global support.

The sun is shining...

2009-05-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

It has been a particularly nice weekend - I've not had to do any SAP work (although I've been checking up on some other IT issues). We went out yesterday for a walk in the country, and it was extremely relaxing. Because of that, I'm in a slightly better mood and decided to write about some parts of the project that have been a bit more positive.

For one thing, we are getting data cleaned up. About 4 years ago, I raised the issue of data integrity and consistency and it has been a topic of conversation many times since. Although people have tried to do this at various stages, we have a large amount of really poor data in the various systems. For example, in the legacy systems we use, the customer / supplier addresses don't match, and not just the wrong zip codes - some of it is far worse. Few of the systems have consistent contact information and many of the details are out of date (people no longer working at the particular company for example). I hate to say it, but there is a similar problem with product information, manufacturing data, accounting information etc as well.

The SAP project has been a good opportunity to address this; and a considerable amount of work has been put in to tidy up the data before migrating it over into the new system. People were tasked with this and a lot has been done - although I think we could have done a better job of explaining what they needed to do as several of them didn't get it right, and we have had to send the data back to them for checking not just once or twice, but many times. A case in point was one of the sales staff dealing with pricing for export - after 3 months, he still hadn't got the right prices against the right products. In the past he had been allowed to get away with asking for changes to be made by the IT staff when errors were found, but not on this occasion.

As a result of all this work, we now have a much better idea of where some of our pricing is wrong, and we can adjust this to ensure that in future it is much better - we know that we have lost potential orders in the past as our pricing was too high, and now I think we can be a bit more competitive.

For many years now, the production team have worked on getting a leaner approach to the job, and they always have a project underway to improve processes. I know that they have used the SAP project to take a good look at some of the specific processes they have not previously covered to see if there is a better way of working. The project team in particular have benefited from this navel gazing - I think that they will need to look again at some of their processes in about a years time though, as I'm not sure that they have achieved what they need to. However, having taken a long hard look at what they do for this project, I hope that it will enable them to do it again.

Although the accounting side is still not working as it should, it has highlighted a big issue relating to reporting - this was not something that we did particularly well in the past. If we can get all of the various reports working correctly, then I expect we have a much better understanding of where our costs are coming from. At a previous company I worked for, they could accurately show what each sale cost, to indicate profit or loss - my current employer only knows that once all of the finances for the year have been finalised.

There is another small project that I am working on for our telesales people and it has highlighted some of the areas where it is clear we could do much better. We had hoped that the CRM would build upon this so that we could streamline the process. That has most definitely not worked, but the principle has been shown to be sound.

These various things have confirmed something - that most people in the business don't actually know what it is they want. Because of this, it is difficult for them to articulate their needs in a way that makes sense in IT terms. To be fair to the consultants, this has been a real problem and made worse as most of them haven't had experience in our paricular sector. However, having to go through these various steps, painful as they have been, has actually been of some benefit. Although they still have a way to go, most of the managers now do appreciate some of the issues relating to poor data, incomplete requirements definition etc. And that can't be a bad thing!

Might even head to the beach this afternoon - it looks as if it will be a great day for swimming.

Status Report

2009-05-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

The go live is delayed again - it seems appropriate to put together an overview of where we are.

From the previous post, you'll know that the CRM just isn't working - the consultants are squirming like worms on a hot plate, but whatever they say, it is just no good in it's current format. We've tried our best, but at some point we will have to move on.

By department, Marketing probably have the least to worry about - no CRM, and nothing else has been arranged. They will almost certainly not be using SAP at all.

The Sales staff are reasonably happy with their processes in the ERP and can make quotes, place orders etc. fairly well. There is a problem in that it still doesn't price things up correctly; some of the tests have come out with really bad results, up to $100 out on a single item. This is being looked at, but it has been an issue for about 6-8 months now. There were problems with the output documents such as invoices, confirmations etc. but most of these have been rectified. The remaining issues are a nuisance, but wouldn't stop us going live - although we might look a bit stupid with some of the errors.

Purchasing is also working well for the most part - their only problems are back to back ordering and batching of purchase items which have been an issue almost from the beginning. There have also been some concerns over the releasing of purchase orders; we have found occasional glitches. However, these have not been too serious.

Within Manufacturing, most of the processes are also OK, but there has been an issue with goods movement - it still isn't right. About a third of them are having to be corrected by the senior production manager and he has been given much higher access than would normally be the case just so that he can correct these problems. They do have an issue in that some of the workshop documentation they need is still not yet working - and this could cause serious delays in the output as the staff have to wait for production managers to resolve quite simple inquiries.

The Inventory is a big problem - so far, we've not been able to get a valid figure on anything, and some of the errors are so riduculous. Literally thousands of items appear on stock figures instead of 1.

The Project Team are badly affected by this and it has proven to be the biggest failure so far. Transfer of goods between sites generates all sorts of strange anomalies. On top of that, only about 10% of the standard project tests came out even close to being correct - several have generated errors in the 10s of thousands of dollars and in one case almost half a million dollars.

Logistics have managed to work around the few issues that they had - there is a problem with the stock racking, but they can live with it. They have been waiting for their output documentation for months - they finally got it sorted about a month ago, and we've also now managed to get the address labels printing this week. However, there is still an issue with some of the output - addresses don't quite appear correctly. This is not too serious, but we would like to get it right if possible.

The finance though is a mess - the chart of accounts just didn't match what we needed. The consultant that was supposed to be their specialist didn't seem to understand some of the basic requirements. At this stage, we can just about invoice, but there are major discrepancies and no sign of how these can be resolved yet. They also don't have access to a lot of the reports that we were told they would be able to generate. It is still being worked on, but the Accounts staff are not happy at all.

The QA / QC people are also not satisfied - the defect notification aspect appears to be non operational. They have tried several times, but so far the consultants appear to have no one that has even the most basic understanding of this aspect.

There were so many other reports missing, that almost every department was concerned. We have had a specialist on site and he has fixed several of these, but not all of them. This of course is a major reason for buying an ERP system - without it, we will struggle to use it for more than a few months.

Finally, we are supposed to have a Document Management system, and yes it is installed. However, there are serious questions still unanswered about how it will work - it was supposed to automate several processes, but instead they have become more labor intensive. We were given to understand over a year ago that they had a way of scanning incoming paper based files for auto assigment - this was completely incorrect, the consultants just referred us to another company that wanted to sell us new xerox machines at twice the price we paid for the ones we have, and still use a manual system for assignment.

So there we are - the go live date has been pushed back again and is now beginning of 4th quarter 2009. When we first met with the consultants, they promised us a go live of January 2008 - I said at the time that was completely impossible, but they were so confident. The strange thing is that their director insists that they made no such promise despite us showing him the actual letters that he wrote.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

CRM - Sour CReaM

2009-05-12T10:46:00.000-07:00

It's been a while - time to try to catch up....

When we first looked at SAP, the VP then in charge of sales wanted the CRM package. He completely bought into the promises - linking into ERP, all the pipeline reporting etc. We had a number of different systems used all over the group and it made sense to buy a single package that every one could use.

When the consultants did the first presentation of the CRM, I was not impressed - it just didn't work. The guy doing the demo showed the pages, but no actual data or processing. We had a second demo a couple of months later, and they didn't show the product at all.

After the project started, it was several months before they had gotten the system installed. I setup user accounts as instructed and the client software. It was only about 2 months after this that we were told we would be using a browser based version - and I was given no information on setting that up.

The "CRM specialist" provided for us finally gave a URL for the sales people to use - but it didn't actually work. I'd bought some books and one of those had some info on setting up the BSP application in the user favorites - without that, we'd never have got started. After several hours of working to try to identify why it wouldn't work thru the browser, I worked out it was a security issue - there were some settings in IE6 that needed changing (even more in IE7). Once these changed, it got us started for real.

We then ran into some more issues. It actually took the "CRM specialist" a YEAR to realise that there was a specific user role that had to be used by all users. Prior to that, I had to give everyone the SAP_ALL profile just to allow them to work in the CRM. He also failed to provide any real information on setting up the business partner relationships, which I was told were essential to getting it working; I did find some info in one of the books, but to this day, I don't know if what I did was right.

There is a component for "organizational model" - this sets out the relationships between staff so that (I think) it allows the workflow to process jobs giving the relevant alerts etc. He created this model and I've not seen a bigger pile of crap in my life. The names of staff were mixed in with the names of the consultants, plus what I think were made up names. The actual job functions were all wrong, the site details were wrong, people in the wrong user groups, wrong sites, wrong job functions - well you get the picture.

I did work out how to change this and managed to correct it - then was told that this cannot be transported between systems so has to be manually changed in each client. Having made the changes (taking several days), I was not happy when I found out that he had gone in and modified it further, making a mess of it again.

So far, it would fair to say that this was just teething troubles - but it was far worse than that. The sales staff had real problems using the CRM software - it was slow, painfully slow. It would take literally a minute to open the main page. Then to go between sections could take 20-30 seconds at a time. It was flaky as hell - the system would crash regularly even when only one person at a time was working in it. Four sales staff spent an afternoon doing some testing - in one hour they crashed it a total of 19 times. Even when it didn't crash, they found it impossible to enter data at the speed that is required when someone is on the phone giving you an order.

We moved onto the test system from the development system - and the sales manager found out that the consultant had copied over all of the crap data from the dev system. (Subsequently found that this had gone to the production system as well). It was then discovered that the CRM didn't link to the correct ERP system - this was only finally corrected 6 weeks ago - and yes that was because I had found out where it was going wrong and corrected it.

They had also promised that the CRM would link into Exchange /Outlook, but when this was tested, an error message was produced that we needed to install a CDO from Microsoft. Having checked on this, I discovered that this is a bullshit message - it's only required for earlier versions. In fact it is a security issue and can be easily corrected. However, the senior consultant kept insisteing during meetings that we were being awkward because we wouldn't install this CDO despite my showing them that trying to install the software produces a message saying it is not needed.

There were numeous messages back and forth - but they took their sweet time to answer anything, sometimes weeks and on one occasion a month. It seemed impossible to get anyone that actually knew anything about the product. They sent a guy over from Germany, who spent 2 days on site, and I'll be damned if I know what he actually achieved.

So there we are - the CRM is pretty much unusable for anything. The sales staff really don't want to waste any more time on it and I don't blame them. At this stage, they would be far better off using an Excel spreadsheet for what they want. We've had about 4 meetings between the director from the consultants and our CEO in the last 3 weeks. The last one was really nasty - our CEO has asked for our money back and has been told he won't get a red cent. That's about $80,000 down the pipes and he is pissed as hell. We've actually held off on making any payments to them in the last 4 months - and they have no chance of getting any more money from us.

Bottom line - the CRM is piss poor and we are already looking at finding another product.

User Roles

2009-04-25T11:00:00.001-07:00

When the project started, we looked at the amount of access that users would need to get their specific jobs done. I’m well aware that if a user has too much access, then there is the potential for them (possibly quite un-intentionally) to cause a lot of damage, and made the point of explaining this in some detail. It was agreed by everyone that we needed to be really careful about what permissions were set-up.

Now having dissed the consultants on a regular basis, I am prepared to say that in this area, they did actually make some sensible suggestions. I’ve not worked with SAP before (although I’d heard about it from others) and I was prepared to be guided by their advice on this.

They suggested that I create a series of “Job Roles” which would be the basis of the permissions. Originally these were based more on their modules within SAP, but after a few tests, I felt that it was better to manage it more around our departmental structure. There is also a hierarchy of user, supervisor & manager as required. This was agreed in a meeting with the project team, way back about 2 months after we started the project. (This also actually fits well with the way that we’ve structured our AD)

The guy that showed me the process was quite helpful – he made the time to cover the main points, and then left me to get on with setting it up. He did say that it normally takes 1-2 weeks to set-up the initial user accounts and roles – in fact, it was completed within 24 hours. OK, the initial roles only had a limited number of transactions within them as that was all we had been advised of – we knew this would change as we learned more about the product.

After the blueprint phase was completed, the various consultants then started to talk in more details with the various members of the project team. From these discussions, I started to get a number of requests for additional changes. These were added at the earliest opportunity to allow people to check things out. I then found that some of what had been explained to me was slightly incorrect; so had to spend a couple of weeks going back through some of the roles to correct errors in the authorisation objects as a result. But again, that’s all right by me as I expected some of these problems.

This went on for some time; as the project team worked with the consultants, they would find out about yet more transactions that they not previously heard of – I was regularly getting 10 - 15 requests for these to be added per day (sometimes just one t-code or authorisation object, occasionally dozens). Although happy to add these, I felt that we needed to be more structured in our approach; I was concerned that I was being asked to add specific items without the need for a user to have these verified, and that this would give access that actually wasn’t needed.

I had spent some time trying to explain this to the internal project team and although they said they understood, it was clear that this was not the case. It has taken a while to get to the stage where they now really do appreciate the potential problems. In the end that I was covering this almost on a one to one basis with the guys and gals – it was the only way to make sure that they knew and I didn’t want them to feel that I was putting any of them down in front of their colleagues.

The biggest challenge for me was that the different sites in each country work in different ways – different products, different processes. Although it would require a lot more admin, to get the most value, it was thought we needed a different set of roles for each site. Now SAP standard practice is that all user roles are prefixed with a Z – they don’t use this, so if you do a search using Z*, it only produces your own roles. Sounds good – but we actually have a lot of roles, and duplicating them by country made it messy. So I suggested that we could use other letters for each country – say Y for Canada, X for Mexico etc. This has worked really well; it’s made life easier and we should get what we want from it all.

It was then suggested that we could use a similar practice for other areas – for example reports, structure etc. This was seen as a really good idea – unfortunately they didn’t stick to it. We found that we had to go back over quite a few items to correct them as the consultants hadn’t used the same structure throughout – it caused some confusion to be sure. Our PM has gone through a lot of these and straightened them out – it’s taken a while, but he is getting there.

What does worry me a bit is that I’m still getting request for changes, even after all this time. I think that part of this is due to the number of changes in consultants. I may be wrong, but they seem to each favor different methods, different transactions etc. As a result, with each change of consultant, yet more t-codes are requested. I did a quick check on the number of these – I now have in excess of 3,000 copies of requests for changes stored in a folder that I created specifically to keep track of the requests.

It’s also the case that as we do more testing, we are finding more requirements for changes. According to their original project plan, all of the changes should have been finished about 3 months before we went live – certainly before the user training began. However, as we carry out more of the training, we are finding more and more issues where the user actually needs more access than the role was given during the sessions with the consultants. I suspect that I am still going to be getting these requests for months to come.

The main thing that concerns me is the amount of time involved in all of this. During the original pitch, I specifically asked them to highlight the amount of work involved; this was to try to see if we would need additional resources. They assured our directors, that the maximum amount of work involved in administration would be 2-3 hours a week – in fact, there are 2 of us working on this and from records we have kept, we are averaging 3-4 hours a day each. This is not just user account or role admin, but server and system maintenance as well.

Note that this has to be done on top of our normal jobs – because we were told that no additional resources were needed, none have been provided. In reality, based upon what we have seen so far, we need at least one other person. I also believe that as the other sites come on line, and we need to keep system running for more of the day, we might need another person and start a shift working pattern – something we have previously avoided.

There we are - just over 2 months to go – however, there may be another delay. We will probably know more about this in about 2 weeks time.

The days and months go by..

2009-04-08T02:03:00.000-07:00

I hadn't realised just how long ago it was that I last posted - almost a month.

A few weeks ago, it was my birthday - the kids put together a special treat for me and we planned a meal at a local restaurant. Of course, I was late home, just time to hit the shower and change, then off out with wet hair. I have to be honest, I didn't feel like celebrating, and we cut the evening a bit short. When we got home, I sat down and fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was still there; and my wife had got a blanket and was there with me. I can't get over how lucky I am to be married to her - either I did something really good in a previous life, or this is a case of "pay it forward".

My wife felt that I needed to see the family physician again. He confirmed that my blood pressure is still climbing, although the cholesterol is OK (just). He wants me to take a vacation and I can't disagree with him; we are looking at taking a break later in the year. I don't care where it is - just somewhere that I can relax and forget about all this crap.

Anyway, back to work - I managed to get all of the support package updates loaded. There were a few issues afterwards, but I also managed to get those sorted as well. As I said previously, the only training I've had has been the one day early last year, and that wasn't that good. I feel that despite this, I'm actually making some ground up, although it is still very difficult. As one of the commentators said "SAP = Slow And Painful".

The project team have been working on doing end user training. As a result, there isn't a day that goes by when I don't get requests for changes to user role permissions. Most of these, I can do fairly quickly and I am at the point where I can quote most of the transport numbers for the roles - I've been doing this far too long! This has been happening for about a month now; and the general feeling is that we are not going to hit the go-live date by a long margin. This has caused considerable upset - the CEO is not happy to move it yet again. However, I don't see that he has a choice; we are still waiting for so much work to be completed. Almost every week, we find that something that was fixed is broken again. There are still issues that have been highlighted previously (one going back over a year) that still have yet to be fixed.

None of the consultants have been on site over the last month, but they are still working on stuff. I had a really nasty call from their project leader demanding to know why he couldn't get access to our system - the reason was that someone from SAP Active Support was carrying out some work to correct an error in a database table made by one of his colleagues. That has caused yet another set of emails to fly back and forth as they deny that it is anything to do with them.

Our Sales Director has also been in contact with their people. We bought their CRM system on the basis that it would be useful to have it as it links in to the ERP side and this would save a lot of issues. Unfortunately, it has been a complete disaster - the software is slow, buggy, unstable and it's been reported many times that it isn't linking correctly although the CRM consultant said that it was all set-up as it should be. I finally managed to get directions to correct the link, but it still doesn't seem to do what they promised it would. It's so slow that the sales staff would simply not be able to use when talking to customers.

The CRM runs in Internet Explorer and it crashes when more than 3 or 4 people are working on it. There have also been some issues with incorrect data being returned from some of the searches. It links to Exchange for the email, but there seems to be an issue with saving the emails and we have had some corruption of data. The reporting seems to be skewed; we have had some odd outputs, and although they said that they had the output text sorted, it's wrong again. The worst was a printout that should have been 1 page showing a customers basic sales data for the previous month - it came out as over 100 pages, most of it complete garbage.

Our CEO took this up with a director from the consultants - his response was to say that it works perfectly, that hundreds of customers use it and that it must be down to the stupidity of our staff. I'm not sure where we are going to go from here - the CEO has pretty much given them an ultimatum, it works as we need by the end of May, or he wants his money back. In the meantime, the sales people have another CRM system that they think will do the job; it is about a quarter the price of the SAP CRM.

So where we go from here, I really don't know. My guys and I are working long hours, weekends and putting all the effort in that we can; but we are getting tired, and there are some minor health issues which are starting to appear which never bothered us previously. The project manager and project team are all despondant; they are trying their best, but it just doesn't seem to be good enough. The CEO recognises this, but he is in a difficult position politically - if we delay further, it will reflect badly on him. He's not stupid though - he sees the problems and can see how bad things could be if we go before we are ready.

Well enough for now - I have to prepare a report for the next board meeting.

Help me....

2009-03-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post. Just so much going on that I don't feel like writing anything. However, I've completed something that has been outstanding for a while, so I feel like adding to the blog again.

The CEO is getting really unhappy with the consultants. When we first started work, they insisted that they had to do the installation, and would be responsible for getting it all up and working. I said at the time that I wanted to be involved in this as over the long term, it makes more sense for people on site to take ownership. OK, I accept that it sounds like I'm protecting my job (and that of my staff), and that may be partly true, but I have worked for a company that outsourced a lot of their development and support. When things go well, they are OK, but when they go wrong, it is godawful.

Anyway, having done the first installation, the consultants started work on the second 2. About 10 months ago, they indicated that the work was done. Then a few months went by and one of the project team raised an issue about something not working. After a couple of weeks, the consultants still hadn't fixed the problem, so the guy raised the matter with the CEO. He then called the director of the consultants to ask what was going on and arranged a meeting. That person turned up and during the meeting, he made it very clear that he blamed me for the problems; I hadn't carried out any upgrades or patching.

Now quite why I was supposed to responsible for this when they had refused to provide information or training was not clear; and things got pretty heated. I also showed my notes from a meeting right back at the beginning - it showed that they had said that they would take care of all installation work up to the go-live point.

Anyway, basically, he refused to accept any responsibility and so I was dropped right in it. One the guys found a picture on the internet - it shows an old wooden trading station building, the sort common in the old west and up north. The name on the building shows that it is at a well known creek - and outside are a selection of canoe paddles. They blew the picture up and printed a copy off, which went on the wall of the office. The CEO didn't think that it was too funny, but he didn't say anything, so it's still there.

So over the past 8 months, I have been learning to do things the hard way; find a problem, post it on the SAP help desk site. Then when they respond, I get them to talk me through a process. It's slow painful work, and can get really frustrating. I got in really early one morning a few months back to talk to a guy in Germany about an issue. It took 2 hours, but eventually, we sorted the problem.

Now doing it that way is not going to make me an expert - I doubt that I would even call myself reasonably competent yet. But having gone through stuff with these guys, it has become plain that the consultants are not doing things the way that SAP would want them to; far from it. Several times, the SAP support guy or gal has asked why something has been setup the way that it has (and of corse I don't know). When I queried this, the people at the consultants really got pissed - it's none of my damn busness. Well actually I disagree - OK, I don't own business, but I am responsible for the IT.

Anyway, they are all off site at the moment and won't be back for a couple more weeks. In thwe mean time, one of the SAP support gals highlighted that there were a whole heap of support packages missing. I carried out some work for her and she identified what needs to be added. I have actually lost track of how many I've applied, but I think it's over 20 so far, and I still have 5-6 more to do. During the time working on it, I had some failures, and when I queried, they told me that the kernel needed updating.

If you haven't worked with SAP, then the chances are you think of updates like Microsoft updates; but it doesn't work that way. You apply a patch, but it then reports that there is prerequisite package needed. You apply that and go back again, but it then reports another is missing. Each package is completely separate - no roll ups. I spent all day last Wednesday working on one patch.

Ah well, tomorrow is another day.

Let me do, and I understand

2009-02-21T00:15:00.000-08:00

I've been tied up for the past week (guess why!) so I've not had the time to post - and next week isn't going to be much better.

When I last described the process, the project team had finally begun to start work on their own areas. They were working in one's or twos with a specific consultant that was suppose to be a particular expert in that module. We were fortunate that we had been able to allocate a number of rooms for the project - 2 decent sized meeting rooms at the main site, another at a second site, a smaller interview room at each site plus, the video conference suites. In addition, we had occasional use of smaller rooms in the particular areas for the project.

I had arranged with the site maintenance people to put in some extra electrical outlets and we bought some cheap video projectors which were semi-permananetly mounted in most of these rooms. This allowed the consultants to do what they did best - PowerPoint presentations. However, we got a lot more use out of the projectors later, so I won't complain too much.

The initial meetings did start to show some of the actual transactions within the software (think applications) and we began to start assigning the various transactions to user roles so that the project team could work out which of the staff needed what transaction to do their job. Now this sounds like quite a simple task, but unfortunately it isn't. In many cases, the project team didn't fully appreciate the amount of work that they would be involved in - I know that some of them thought it would be a matter of a few training sessions and then they would know all that they needed to know (boy were they shocked!).

In most cases, they found that they needed to allocate several days just to run though the process, refining it down to the various steps, then they would be told to use a specific transaction. Then they would start on this, only to find that they didn't understand the next step at various points for the different variations, so would have to go back to the consultant. Later, most of the project team were doing at least an hours work a day over many months.

Anyway, after about 3 months work, it was decided to start the process of training end users - remember that this was in preparation for the original go live date last year. It was assumed that the end users would need 1 or 2 training sessions (what is it that they say about "assume"? it makes an ass out of u & me) and about 5 -6 weeks were put aside to cover all end users. In fact, we found that most end users needed a good 6 - 8 sessions plus some extra time to work on things on their own. The meeting rooms with the video projectors really paid off at this point - the project team persons would act as the trainer with 4 - 5 people at a time and demonstrate what they had to do. Some older PCs had been installed in one room to allow the end users to practice what they had seen and we also got hold of some older laptops which proved a godsend for this purpose.

Now I have a simple criterion for measuring the quality of the training. A person should be able to do a given task twice in succession without making a mistake or needing to refer to any training material. When you reach that stage, you can say that the person is ready to start using the product. Now this doesn't mean that they won't make mistakes - far from it. However, it usually means that they can be productive.

Our consultant just couldn't seem to understand this view - they seemed to work on the basis that "I've shown you, so you are fully trained". I'm sorry but that has just got to be a completely dumb ass way of looking at it. We don't let people read a manual on driving and then let them lose in a $50,000 car on the freeway - or allow people that have used Microsoft Flight Simulator, fly a jumbo jet.

At this stage, I would say only about 25% of the end user staff are in a position where they are ready - I wouldn't yet say that they are confidant. Many of them did do some training, but that was months ago and they haven't touched it since. I suspect that they have forgotten most of what they learned and will have to go through it again. I have tried to encourage many of them to do work on their own - but without the cooperation of their section leaders, it probably won't happen.

The consultants insisted that the project team had to produce their own training material - I'd heard this before and I do kind of understand part of the reason behind it. But I still feel that they could provide better stuff that they do - it seems a huge waste of time to constantly re-invent the wheel. Some one out there must have come up with good stuff that could save us having to put so much work into just producing simple user guides.

We tried a couple of different ideas, but decided that our training material should be done as PowerPoint presentations; these were set-up, then modified during the training session to make them more accurate and relevant. They were then saved to a SharePoint Server so that they would be available to the end users for reference. If we could persuade the users to actually make use of the material, I might even say that it's a good idea. Hopefully, they will eventually realise that unlike SAP, I'm not going to charge them for downloading the material!

Enough for today - I'll try to post more when I get time.

Lock and load

2009-02-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

There is one thing about SAP that I do like - the data migration workbench. This allows you to load data from older systems. In the past, many other systems that I have worked with only allowed data to be loaded using SQL script - most just don't provide any support for this at all.

The actual process sounds a bit complex - well it's not that simple, but once you have done it a few times, it doesn't seem too bad. I would suggest that for most people, the hardest part is getting a project structure to manage it in place. Certainly, we started using a structure suggested by the consultants, but quickly found that it didn't meet our needs. Primarily because of the need to get the data loaded in the correct sequence, but also because we found some of the data was insufficiently prepared. We also found that they badly underestimated how it long it would take, I think mostly because they just didn't understand how much data we needed to move, even though we had actually explained this to them on several occasions.

Essentially, the data is extracted from the legacy systems in the form of flat text or comma separated files - these are then opened up in a spreadsheet. The records can be tidied up and the record attributes are placed in the colum headers (color, material number, weight, customer name, whatever). The data is then saved as a flat text file with the headers, and then the workbench allows this data to be processed record by record. Think of it in terms of a vb script, SQL script or even a simple Macro.

The problem of course is that the data has to be absolutely correct - if it isn't, the process will fail. This could be caused by the wrong data in a field, the wrong header or just simple mismatches. There is a process to re-run the failed import, but it still requires the data to be correct.

In many ways, this was the hardest part - people simply don't understand that a computer will only do what it is told. In many cases, they don't even see the error - many studies have been done that prove people often see what they want to see rather than what is in front of them. Several of the files had to be re-done, not just once, but several times. As a result, the load process for just one system, took well over 6 months, where we were told it would take a couple of months at the most.

However, once the structure is set up and proven, the good thing is that it can also be used on the other systems. This saves quite a bit of time, as it means you don't have to keep re-designing the process.

One thing we did find, was that it is better done by one person - we tried with a couple of us working on items in parallel. It just caused too many problems, and it was decided that it was wasting time. Since it was given to just one person, many of the problems we had had have faded. It also allowed a much more managed approach - as a result, the second half of the process became a lot easier.

Well enough for tonight - early start tomorrow.

Slowly, slowly...

2009-02-13T23:10:00.000-08:00

We had been working on the SAP project for 6 months; we had completed the "blueprint" phase and had more or less agreed with the consultants' description of our business processes. The development system was in place and working ready for us to use. We had set-up a special training room with a number of PCs, a video projector, a whiteboard and some other essential materials to help get people up to speed. The project team were straining at the leash - they wanted to get on and start to learn how it all works.

Now if you've read any of the rest of the blog, you'll know that I've not been too impressed by the consultants that we had on the project or their methods. However, I will say that at this point, we did start to feel that perhaps we had turned a corner.

Their project manager had spent some time with me discussing user accounts and user roles - from my point of view, a really important topic. The company wanted to make sure that all staff can do the job that they need to do, but we also wanted to make sure that no-one has more access than they need. I had set-up accounts for the project team, and created some basic user roles based for the most part on the primary jobs in the business. The sapgui software was installed on the PCs that would be used - just the training ones to begin with, but the whole estate was done within 3 weeks.

The individual consultants were allocated areas of responsibility and they then started to discuss these areas with the different project team members. The meetings focussed on showing people the software in operation, and how to do certain tasks within each of these areas. The project team members were asked to create training material that they would then use to train those staff under their jurisdiction. Some templates using different methods were created and it was eventually decided that everyone would use the PowerPoint presentation templates - we also set-up an area on the SharePoint server for people to store these for reference.

Within a few days, the project team were starting to sound quite positive - they were now able to logon and experiment in their own time at their own speed. Some of them had started to enter data and were able to now ask questions of the consultants on the processes and get a response that they were beginning to be able to understand in terms of how the software worked.

Over the next few weeks, these sessions continued. There were some frustrations - the data that was being input was mostly incomplete and many of the processes in the software couldn't be completed because of this. Several times, people would start work, find they couldn't continue because of missing data, wait for it to be added then start again, only to find that something else was missing. In a lot of cases, there were configuration problems; either not done or incorrect.

Despite this, some good progress was made. A lot of the team members were finding that they were missing authorisation to do various jobs - they would report this and I would quickly add the required items. I will say that the actual process for this is quite long winded, although once you are used to it, it can be done reasonably easily. There was some confusion among the team members - they are not used to the discipline required to report the problems accurately, and on several occasions, I had to go back to them to remind them that the process had to be followed as had been explained.

The sales staff hit a few issues - they have their own way of working and were not particularly open to changing this and they didn't like the CRM system. But the production staff were up and running very quickly, and shortly after that, the purchasing, inventory and shipping people were starting to feel confident. The finance people didn't get their training at this stage - they had been given some training material, but the consultant spent a lot of time just making configuration changes, so they didn't get too much exposure to the system at this time.

But overall, it was felt that we were making good progress - individual areas of the business were starting to see some real progress and this was generating some very positive attitudes. As a result, although the go-live date was rather ambitious, people did feel that it was achievable.

A couple of initial training sessions for end users were scheduled - these were to be run by the project team, not the consultants which is the SAP way of doing things. The first sessions were run and they did run into some difficulties - lessons were learnt, a few changes were made and the sessions were re-run. Some of the training material was found to be a bit unsatisfactory and these were then modified appropriately.

We also started the data preparation ready for loading. I will write more on this later, but at this stage, it was mostly about understanding the process, and the IT staff quickly became fairly comfortable using it.

So there we were - finally out of the starting blocks, and flying down the track. Yes it had taken us a while to get to this point, but were finally moving towards the finish - what could go wrong?
Well later parts of this blog might answer that.

Hardware hassles

2009-02-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go back to the start of the project to highlight some of the issues with the hardware and installation of the software.

I had asked that we get details on how to do the installation, but the consultants director had insisted that installations could only be done by a qualified "basis" consultant. Arrangements had been made to begin the installation almost at the same time as we were conducting the launch meetings.

We were told that they would arrange for one of these "basis" people to be on site, but at the last minute, I was told the person concerned would do the work over a remote connection. Not a problem as we have used remote connections ourselves for many tasks. However, there was a problem as he needed the CDs and DVDs swapping; that's one job you can't do remotely. To make life easier, I copied all of the required disks to a network location so he could get on with job without needing us to keep swapping disks.

The thing that did surprise me was that he seemd to take a long time to complete the job - there were a number of disks involved, but after some 10 days, the system was still not working. In fact, it was actually almost 6 weeks before all of the installation was finally done so that it could be used - and that was just the one system.

Now if you have not worked with SAP, I should highlight that standard practice is to have 3 systems - Development, Test and Production. The idea is that you start with work on the development system, validate it on the test system before moving it to the production system. (This has some merits, although it does make it a tad long winded to do anything.) Much of the configuration work is supposed to be done on the development system to begin with, then it is "transported" between the systems. In theory at least, the 3 systems will all be identical; as you are moving changes between systems, they should be synchronised.

Having had the first system installed, it was several months before they started on the second one - and that was started by a different person to the first one. He only got about half way, before he was replaced by a second person. In turn, this person was replaced by yet another for the third system - which was only finally finished off by another. Subsequently, we have had another 2 people involved to do certain changes.

Now, I expected that these people would all work to set up the systems in the same way - I quickly found that was not the case. Each of the 3 systems was set-up differently and we are still finding variations which cause the occasional problem. A few times I have had to report issues to the SAP service market place (their support system) and their support staff have expressed some questions about why certain things are the way that they are. The answer I was given is that there is no "standard" way to set-up these systems - I find this a little bit odd, but I suppose it is not too different to the way that Windows can vary on different PCs or servers. However, in our case the 3 servers are all identical hardware so I would expect them to be set-up identically. Clearly, this is not the case.

Another issue I had was with the training - or lack of it to be more precise. We were given a massive printout and a 2 day session with a guy who was from part of Eastern Europe, who did speak English, but wasn't completely comfortable with it. Most of the 2 days involved him reading from the pages of the printout; we had no access to a working system, and no chance to test any of the work. Since then, we have had the chance to test some of what we were given, and we found much of the text was incorrect.

We have moved on since then - but it has been a major stumbling block. We are still learning new things every day and often purely by trial and error and I have to say, it is a major source of frustration. My team are willing to learn new things, but it does seem to be a very haphazard process. I got an email from someone a while ago and he suggested that we have at least another 2 years work ahead of us, possibly more in order to reach a good level of competence.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

Mea culpa

2009-02-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

So far I've been pretty harsh about the consultants - however, I am prepared to say that we didn't get everything right first time.

When the project started, I and a couple of colleagues made a number of suggestions about the best way to proceed. The consultants disagreed with us, and suggested that as they had done this many times, it would be better to follow their lead. That was a definite mistake as it took the ownership away from us - we are definitely dancing to their tune.

I also wanted to start work on the data migration a lot earlier, and there is no question that this would have been much better for us as the process took far longer than the consultants thought it would - about 4 times longer in fact. In addition, the work was supposed to be done by the various team leaders - the assumption was made that they understood what was required but after a month or so, it was clear that many of them didn't. This lead to several delays as we had to go back over various areas more than once. It didn't help that some of the consultants gave slightly misleading information - but our people should have been able to pick that up a lot quicker.

Another issue was to do with the personnel - our guys (and girls) are really quite well motivated, but in some areas, they don't perhaps understand the internal processes as well as they should. I suggested that we should involve a few more staff, but that idea was rejected. It's now become obvious that we need those other people involved - and if that had started a while back, it would certainly have helped us identify some of the more serious issues a lot sooner.

In particular, one specific process area was assigned to one person - it's a major project area and I felt that altho' the guy concerned knows what he is doing, it's gotten just too much for him on his own. That has now become painfully obvious - so we have a number of other people that are being tasked to assist him, but it would definitely have been better if this help had been available much sooner.

From my point of view, the worst thing has been that many of us are effectively doing two jobs - our normal daily work and the implementation project. It becomes very difficult to balance the two areas and the pressure is high for everyone. Several of us are in desperate need of a break - I've had no vacation now for 2 years, other than a couple of days at a time and yes, I know that it's beginning to show as I find myself getting uptight over silly things. One of the other managers came in today; he's just had the results of a medical test and his cholesterol level is way up, an increase of over 80% - his physician told him he has to take immediate action to bring it down.

Each area of the business was responsible for their own data and training preparation - however, 2 areas are really behind everyone else. The finance staff are really struggling to get to grips with some of the new methods, and the project system still doesn't work sufficiently to be able to carry out any real testing. Partly due to lack of resources, partly due to motivation - the training was also inadequate. But they didn't do anything about it, and they didn't highlight the problems soon enough.

That leads me on to the worst aspect. Each area has carried out it's own individual tests, with varying results. Once we started end to end testing, everything started to fall on it's ass. I think in the last 2 months, we actually only had 2 end to end tests that went thru OK, and even those only did so because part of the work was fudged (manually forcing thru something that was supposed to happen automatically). We have more planned, but there is the unspoken suggestion that perhaps we don't need to do all the testing. From everything that I have been told, this is a common error; testing is so important and to miss it out is courting disaster.

Just to make matters worse, we started the end user training 7-8 months ago. Many of the staff that were involved in this have forgotten what they learned - we will have to do it all over again. I've suggested that we tie the two together and get the staff involved in the end to end testing and do the additional training at the same time. To my surprise, this was accepted and it starts next week - I think some of the managers are in for a shock when they see how little the staff remember. There does seem to be a bit of an attitude that they know what they are doing so everyone else does - clearly, that's not the case.

Oh well - onward and upward.

Set your phases to stun

2009-02-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

So there we were - the blueprint phase was complete and the blueprint document was finished up, the verification phase was more or less complete and we had actually signed off on the document (altho' there were a few items that we queried). We then started on the work with the consultants to go thru in a bit more depth on the various processes.

Now, when we first started the project, the idea was to get the whole company involved and we would all go live at the same time. The director from the consultant firm suggested that it might be better to do it in stages, based upon geographical location. Now I don't actually have a problem with that - it makes sense to reduce workload to a manageable level and if we get problems, in theory at least, it still leaves part of the company able to carry on whilst we sort out the issues.

So therefore we had a "phase 1" for us and a "phase 2" for all other sites thruout the company. But then within a few weeks, the consultants started indicating that they thought we would also do the go live for the sites in this state in more than one go - possibly in 2 more phases. It was pointed out right away that this was not practical - we need the input from one of our other sites in order to get the production rolling at this site. Without their input, we would have to do their data entry manually - and we would need about 12-15 staff extra just to do that.

A few weeks after that, they then started to insist that certain things were not part of the initial plan and would require yet more phases. Several times, we went back to the blueprint document to show that yes, we had actually specified something and that they had actually included it in their document. But this didn't seem to worry them - it seemed that if they didn't know about a particular area or process, the immediate reaction was to suggest that it would be dealt with in a later "phase".

About 7 or 8 months into the project, I raised a question about the output documents - invoices, etc. Their PM sat in with our director and told him that it was not part of phase 1 or phase 2 (and I was in the meeting - boy, it got just a bit heated!). You can imagine the reaction from all of our people. I did actually check afterwards and this guy really did think that we would be able to go live without being able to print off any documentation of any kind. I'd point out that right back at the beginning, we had supplied them with a number of pages of the types and functions of the various documents that we would need - they pretty much covered all of the processes, from sales thru to shipping. I had also provided samples of the actual documents, to give them a good idea of what was needed. But no - has far as he was concerned, documents were part of a "later phase".

So here we are - yes we now have a phase 2 and a phase 3 for our sites in other countries (as I said, this makes sense). But they insist that part of what we needed and what was specified at the very start and in their own paperwork will actually be done later. I actually received an email a while back that indicated they expect to be providing us with consultants for at least the next 2-3 years, and that doesn't include the work for the other sites overseas. One comment indicated that they seem to expect to be working with us for at least 5 years more.

I've received some emails from other people that are, or have been involved in SAP implementations; also 2 Oracle implementations. It does seem to me that there is a pattern developing. Most of those people in IT depts that I have spoken to are clearly well respected, with good experience of various projects, but all of them report similar situations in their project. I may be unlucky, but I have yet to hear from anyone that has not experienced some thing along the lines that we have seen.

But perhaps that's just me?

SAPping me slowly..

2009-02-07T06:55:00.000-08:00

Let's go back a couple of years - we had had the initial launch meetings, and tried to get people fired up for this new project. There was then a long period of about 3 months that was their "blueprint" phase. As I said before, this was supposed to analyse our processes and then allow them to identify what we needed to do to replicate them within SAP.

Of course they also said that they would get us to ask the question "is this really the best way to do XYZ?" Now I have no problem with this - there is no question, the purpose of this project is to make us more efficient and so save / make more money making everyones job more secure. The inference is that they will offer a better way to do the various processes.

The "blueprint" phase involved a lot of meetings - a whole heap in fact. What generally happened was they would identify a specific area (as defined within SAP) and then do a line drawing with action boxes for the tasks in that process. I've undertaken a similar process in the past myself - it's known as "critical path analysis" and I tend to use "finite state machine" drawings to describe the process. If it is done properly, it allows anyone to follow the plan and to successfully complete a process, even if they don't know it or understand it.

However, I didn't consider the plans put up by the consultants to be particularly good. I felt that they left out key sections and the way that they handled the process variants was not especially clever - there was room for misunderstandings. However, I accept that different folks have different ways of doing things - I don't believe for one minute that my way is the only way.

At the end of the "blueprint phase", we were supposed to sit down without the consultants, take the revised plans that they supplied, go through them and confirm that these, more or less accurately described the different processes as we wanted. We would then sign these off, and they would then configure the system to meet our needs.

There were a few problems at that point - the consultants wanted us to complete the "verification phase" in a little over 2 weeks. In fact, it took almost a week just to plow thru the sales part on its own. After 6 weeks, we had raised a lengthy list of queries regarding the various stages of the processes we covered, but still signed off on their plans even though we hadn't covered all of them. I was really concerned that there was almost nothing in the plan about aspects of the finances and administration.

In some cases, they had actually made quite fundamental errors. I wasn't too surprised at this as from brief conversations, it was obvious that most of their people had worked in totally different environments to ours. However, this did leave a bad feeling and I know that I wasn't the only one - although at that stage, I was probably the only one to actually say anything.

What did bother me was that having spent all of that time and effort, they then almost never referred back to the plans again. I'm not sure if they have even kept copies (I have). A couple of months ago, there was a question about something not being done and the consultant was adamant that this had never been discussed. I then produced a copy of his company's document showing the line drawing with the specific item as step 4 - one very red faced guy.

I will say that I think that part of the process was more for them than it was for us - but I don't see what they actually got from it. Certainly, most of their staff don't know what's in the plans. Subsequently, some of their people have made really serious errors in the way that they have configured the systems, and it is obvious that they have not referred to any document produced by us.

OK - I've indicated that I hate to waste money. 18 weeks at an average of 4 days per week, 2 consultants per day = 144 man days. At $1400 per day.... well you can see that it is a ton of money. That of course doesn't allow for our people there, sometimes between 5 and 10 staff. So you'd think that this would be pretty important, but I'm not sure that they see it that way. It's almost as if this is the process of implementation that they have been told they have to do, and they follow it to the letter. But I still say that it hasn't achieved what it was supposed to and that inevitably makes the success of the project less likely.

OK enough for now - stay safe out there people. The weather is turning bad and it's time to hunker down and ride it out.

The cost of doing business

2009-02-07T02:28:00.000-08:00

I've been busy the past week - out of the country at a remote site. This is the first chance I've had to add anything more.

The company has several sites, some are quite distant, a couple outside of the country. When I first joined, I was astonished at the amount of travelling that was going on. No-one has ever kept specific details, but I did a (very rough) calculation that among the staff at my site, they were spending an average per month of about 75 -100 days travelling. Some of this was by car, some by plane - very occasionally by train. (This does not include those staff whose job is specifically travelling - sales, trucking etc.)

It's difficult to get any kind of accurate figure, but for travel, hotel & hospitality alone, we were probably spending around a quarter of million dollars for my site alone (which is one of the bigger ones). It seems likely that the company was spending a little over $1 million a year. At the time, gas prices were still stable, but everyone knows what happened there. I dread to think what our costs would have been. This also created issues with staff time wasted.

So one of the first things that I did was to set-up a process of remote access working - this allowed those that were travelling to be able to get on with some work whilst waiting around airport terminals or in hotels. This went down well with almost everyone - productivity went up after an initial period of getting used to it, and now it is seen as absolutely essential. We did have a slight issue a few months ago with some people unable to get access (one of the guys making some modifications and blocked access for about an hour) and the reaction to this showed just how used to it everyone has become.

The next step was to introduce video conferencing -I've worked with it before and know just how good it can be. There were of course a few initial teething troubles (people will play about with the settings) but now it works almost seamlessly. I think that there is at least one VC between sites per day and it is now seen as just another tool. Almost all of the staff have had the opportunity to take part in a VC session. The cost saving to the company cannot be overestimated. The equipment cost around $7,000 per site and we saved that much per month in the first year alone, probably twice that now.

So where does this link to SAP - quite simply, the cost of installation has been enormous and without the VC facility, it would have been a whole lot more. At the initial launch meetings, I estimated that the cost of the 4 meetings were around $35,000. After that, almost all other meetings were conducted over the VC - at one stage, 4 a week and they generally lasted all day.

We still had to have some travelling - there was no getting away from that. However, we have kept some figures that make me feel that I can justifiably say we saved $300,000 last year. Of course, this had never been factored into the calculations for the project which really only ever showed the cost of the software and the consultants. We've had to provide them with office facilities, and at the beginning they were expecting us to provide them with lunch etc. (That soon stopped!)

Now I may sound like I'm being a bit hard-assed about this - and I probably am. Before starting to work in IT, I had a long background in other areas of management; and one thing that I know is that as a manager, I have 3 main areas of responsibility. "To increase sales, to cut costs and to improve margins". This applies to all managers, whatever their title and whatever sector they work in.

The reason for buying SAP is quite simple; we need to improve the way that we do business to make us able to supply our customers with a better and more cost effective product. It should allow the flow of information between all areas of the business that will allow this to happen and make it easier to getter better business decisions. This should also allow us to cut production costs, and lead times.

However, there is a very fine balancing act here. I think it likely that SAP will provide some of those savings and increase our ability to streamline the process from order thru production to sale. However, the cost of implementng it is very high - we have to factor that into our production costs. Essentially, will there be an ROI? I have my doubts - current sales in this country of around $30 million, for the group $75 million. With the current economic conditions, this could contract further - we are still OK at the moment, but are already having to make plans to lay off some staff.

I did some numbers with the FD before Christmas; we would normally expect any project to have a payback of 3-5 years tops. Of course in some cases, it is actually better to set costs off over a longer period, such as for capital plant, but they would still want to see a payback in under 5. For SAP, we cannot see a payback in that period - our estimates make it closer to 12-15 years. That of course assumes that we stay with it that long and that prices only increase by an amount anticipated.

Ultimately, with all the additional costs, is it likely that we would ever see a return? I can't say for certain, but I know that we would have to see some huge savings.

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I also note that there are a couple of people following this blog now; thanks guys for the kind words. I promise to keep writing and hope that you continue to enjoy it.

Keep it in the family

2009-01-31T03:39:00.000-08:00

I suppose at this point, I'd better make some comments about the wife and kids. They have been really great putting up with all sorts of issues. I sometime get home late and in a foul mood; they have put up with an awful lot and deserve to have that recognised. I'm not the only one -the company held a party before Christmas and the wife and me went along. She got talking to a couple of other wifes (don't they always!) who have also had to put with stressed out husbands.

She told me after that 2 of the other managers are heading for divorce - although they may not know it yet. The wives have had enough of late nights, weekend working, cancelled holidays. I've spoken to one of the guys - he missed his son's first game of the season last year, which was the first time the kid had actually played. He was really angry, and I think that if it continues as it is, he will just quit. In the current economic conditions, that's not a good idea - but he said privately that he would rather take a 50% paycut than continue as they are. (Although I'm not sure he really would).

The family got away on holiday last year without me - I have the use of a condo on the coast for a couple of weeks. My eldest girl thought that was OK as it turned into a girl's holiday with my son away at camp. She made a point of telling me that my wife had gone out dancing with them and had had a great time. I wish I had been there, but they deserve the break.

Basically, the consultants are really arrogant - they arrive and expect everyone else to be immediately available. It doesn't matter that we have a business to run, or that they haven't arrange the meetting; we have to be there. If we ask them to do something tho it's a different matter. They can take as long as they like, and if we dare to question why it takes so long, it becomes a real issue.

One of my guys has been involved in loading data from the other systems. He took a day off to take his little girl to hospital as she had taken a fall and needed some attention (she was OK later, but stayed in the hospital for a couple of days). The consultant project manager actually phond him on his cell phone and demanded that he come back to work as they were trying to resolve an issue with purchasing records. He wasn't happy when I explained to him that if he ever does that again, he will have the cell phone lodged in his lower colon.

A short one today; I'm tired and need to rest up.

Security - we don't need no steenkin' security

2009-01-30T11:01:00.000-08:00

Shortly after I joined the company, I spent quite a bit of time (including time at home) working on putting together some policy documents. These dealt with a number of issues including security. In fact, I am certificated for ISO 27001 and after about 2 years, I managed to get the company audited successfully. It was hard work but worthwhile - it has surprised more than a few people how useful that accreditation has proven to be. In several cases, our senior sales people were told by customers that the final decison to buy from us came about because we were accredited for ISO 9001 & 27001, and our competitors were not.

When we started on the SAP project, I presented the consultants with the relevant paperwork. This detailed what security standards we expected them to reach, what we would allow and what we would not. This is not designed to stop people from working - but it is to ensure that a good level of security is maintained and that the data and systems are protected. It also included an agreement for them to sign.

They were not happy with this - I received regularly demands to reduce security level to allow them to do things. When one of their guys came in to install the servers, he wanted full admin access and our network security account details. You can guess what he was told - in plain language, take a hike. We were told that they were working to ISO 27001, but it is quite clear that they are not and that they haven't the faintest idea of what the standard is about.

They want a permenent VPN connection to our systems - OK that need not be a problem, but it allows any of their people access - they have a lot of staff (I asked how many, but they wouldn't tell me) any one of whom can connect to our system at any time day or night. We regularly find them looking around the systems - we've set-up internal blocks so they only have access to the SAP servers. After all why would they need access to anything else? We have intrusion detection facilities and it regularly gets tripped by someone trying to find a way into areas that they are not allowed (2-3 times a month).

What does get me pissed is that we've identified that several of their staff are using a single acount, so it is impossible to identify who did what. They create accounts in the SAP system for people and we have no idea who they are or what they do. Worse, our AV has picked up stuff that has come in from them a number of times - a couple of them were really nasty trojans and a couple of keystroke loggers.

And this takes me to another topic - the number of consultants. We were told that we would need 6 people; 4 main workers, the project manager and a specialist for the finance. In fact, I have lost count of the number of different people that been involved - some have been to one or other of our sites, some I know have connected via a VPN connection and I believe that there are about 8 or 9 that have connected using other peoples accounts. As far as I can tell, we have had at least 41 different consultants and probably more.

At the beginning, we were quoted a set number of days consultancy work to do the implementation (370). In fact we are now well over 800 days, there are another 65 booked for the next 10 weeks, plus, it seems clear that we are still no closer to go-live than we were 5/6 months ago and we will need yet more people. In addition, during the work over the last 2 years, they keep insisting that certain things were not part of the "original blueprint" and that these items are part of a "second phase" of work. Well we certainly never agreed to any such "second phase". I was told by the project manager quite confidently that we should expect to budget for at least another 70 - 100 days of consultancy work each year for the next 5 years.

Now the worst bit - like a lot of companies, we have had to do a lot of work to implement Sarbanes-Oxley. Yes it was a real PITA, but we got there on our old systems. The first one of their financial consultants insisted that SAP automatically complied with SOX, and that may be true - but a process he tried to put in place most certainly did not and the FD went ballistic when he found out. He actually kicked the guy out (had security escort him off the premises) and refused to allow him back on site.

The consultant firm replaced him with a woman who really seemed to know her stuff - for a while the FD began to think that maybe it would all come together. But then she announced she was leaving to have a baby and they gave us a new guy - he barely spoke English. After a couple of weeks, the FD had him kicked into touch as well because he just didn't know enough about the finance system - he was then replaced by another guy. This one does seem to know about it, but he is crap at explaining things - he is also less than careful, and we keep finding that he has done stuff on one system, but not the others. As a result, some (a lot) of the testing has been a total waste.

Oh well - another day, another dollar. I'm going for a beer. More later

All your base are belong to us

2009-01-29T10:43:00.000-08:00

I've spoken to a number of people about SAP installations - it seems that ours is par for the course, although in a couple of areas, we seem to be doing worse than average.

One of these seems to be because they really don't seem to think that we should be running our own hadware. Their head salesman tried to get us to sign to outsource the systems to their datacenter - not quite sure where it is as he was a bit vague, but I think that it is probably India. He quoted a price and then when the FD stopped laughing, he suggested that the company could get rid of me and the savings would cover the cost of that. In fact to cover the cost, they would have to get rid of half our IT team - and the company are not going to do that.

Since then, they have gone out of their way to avoid giving us information or provide adequate training - generally, we get given these enormous .pdf files with the high lever overview and damn all information on how to do anything. We've also had a couple of PowerPoint presentation files with some more info - but often they are incomplete.

We had a problem after the initial installation - they set-up the server, but failed to configure the SQL server properly. As a result, within a week the system ground to a halt and no-one could use it. Now it wasn't too serious at that stage as we were still not actually doing any work on the product, just watching endless presentations about how wonderful SAP is. However, I did keep on at them about getting the system up and running. In fact it was almost 2 months before the problem was resolved, and that was down to myself and one of my staff as we got hacked off waiting for them to do anything - fortunately, we have some experience with MS-SQL and were able to identify the problem and get it fixed.

A month or so later, their head honcho came to site and tried to blame the original problems on us - when it was pointed out that it was their staff that set it up, he tried to say that they left it fully operational, but that we had messed about with it causing the problem. We aked for them to prove this, but of course they couldn't - but that didn't stop them from trying to pin the responsibility on me and my guys.

In fact, that seems to be a regularly theme - if anything goes wrong they immediately try to say that it's our fault. When we downed the servers over a weekend to increase the memory, they tried to say that caused an issue with the configuration. One of their "basis" consultants had made changes to the development system, but hadn't copied these to the others - of course that was yet another excuse for them to insist we were at fault.

In fact, my guys and I are starting to get pretty good at fixing problems even though we haven't had all of the training that we were promised.

Ah well, tomorrow is another day.

Partners in crime

2009-01-28T10:29:00.000-08:00

One thing that really annoys me about SAP; their use of the word "partner".

"Thats a problem for your hardware partner". "You need to refer that to your software partner". "You should call your FI/CO partner" - "you need to discuss with your MM partner".

Essentially, the use of the word "partner" is designed to make people feel that it is a collaborative exercise - of course, it is nothing of the sort. We are THE CUSTOMERS!! You are THE SUPPLIERS!! Are you listening Walldorf? (Of course they are not - they know better than us miserable creatures)

And of course, it is used by the consultants to avoid actually doing anything. If they can pass responsibility onto someone else, you bet they will.

When SAP was just bought by big organisations, it made sense. Most of these types of company would not do everything in house but would have links to specialists that would take on certain functions. Of course, for smaller businesses, that is not the case. We don't have "hardware partners" but suppliers - in many cases, you buy from the cheapest supplier at the time that you need something. It's not too practical to have long term deals as we just don't buy enough to make it worth while for the bigger vendors.

Equally, it's unlikely that companies of our size would have an "installation partner" - we do 2 or 3 servers a year, maybe 10 PCs. These days, equipment comes pretty much pre-configured - join it to the domain and away you go. But no, SAP want us to discuss with our "installation partners" how the system should be set-up. I then set-up a dummy company to handle this and passed details on to the consultants; they then sent some stuff through to the fake email address to advise me that I need to go on numerous courses to get myself "SAP accredited" as an "installation partner". In fact the consultants were our "installation partners" as they wouldn't let anyone else do it.

This came about because before we signed anything, they were asked what specification of hardware was required for the servers. The response was really vague; so I checked out some very nice equipment, (about $60,000 worth), put the details onto a letter and sent it to them with a request that they could confirm it would be adequate. Eventually they did (verbally) agree it would be OK. So we bought it.

However, about 4-5 months into the project we noticed a major problem; shortly after that, we found a couple more - we had some major system instabilities. They immediately told us that what we had was insufficient and that we had to refer back to our "sizing partners" to find out what equipment we really needed.

I then carried out an exercise with one of the largest suppliers of hardware in the world - they asked for information that we just couldn't give them - until the product goes live, we have no way of knowing what levels of some items we will see. However, I made up some numbers that sounded a bit excessive, and let them have that. The upshot of all this was that we were advised to put some more memory in the machines.

But that didn't fix it, so we were told once again to go back to our "sizing partners". God, if we were told this once, we were told this 10 times - and each time we told them that we had, and that we had put extra memory in as required. Later, they started telling us that we had to put even more memory in - but we currently have 20 GB in each server which should be enough by any standard.

They even started getting really snotty when they talked to the directors, telling them that I was being obstuctive - our CEO had one of their guys in and roasted him. After that they got one of their people in support in Germany to connect and he pointed out that there were some configuration items in the software that were wrong; once these were corrected, most of the instabilities vanished. We asked why these han't been addressed by their people - after all, they did the installation of SAP. The response - each system is different.

Going now before I have a coronary.