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 Few of the systems have consistent contact information and many of the details are out of date (people no longer working at the particular company for example).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.
Sunday, 24 May 2009
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Status Report
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.
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.
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
CRM - Sour CReaM
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.
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.
Saturday, 25 April 2009
User Roles
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.
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.
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
The days and months go by..
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.
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.
Sunday, 8 March 2009
Help me....
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.
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.
Saturday, 21 February 2009
Let me do, and I understand
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.
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.
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