Teachers Give ERP Implementations Failing Grades

theodp writes "Nine months after the Los Angeles Unified School District launched SAP HR and Payroll as part of a larger $132M ERP rollout, LAUSD employees are still being overpaid, underpaid or going unpaid. In June, about 30,000 paychecks were issued with errors, falling somewhat short of the Mission Statement 'to effectively deliver services to meet the payroll needs of all District employees serving our students.' Meanwhile, a $17M PeopleSoft-based payroll implementation has been making life miserable for Chicago Public Schools teachers and staff since last April, including June retirees who were stiffed for more than $35M. It's been a bad computer year for CPS staff, who also had to contend with a new $60M system that wasn't up to the task of taking attendance."

Comments

Happening elsewhere too

[mrbill1234]

http://csueu9.blogspot.com/2007/08/peoplesoft-no-pay-for-arizona-state.html

"The move to PeopleSoft at Arizona State has left hundreds of employees high and dry with smaller or empty paychecks. Employees are bouncing checks and having to scramble for loans to pay bills."

Ah, yes... Peoplesoft

[starseeker]

My undergrad college rolled out a Peoplesoft based system with (IIRC) the objective of avoiding having to deal with fixing the old mainframe based setup. After a very large amount of money (which included fixing the old system anyway since the new system wasn't ready in time) we got a new system that (at least from the student side) was less attractive than the old one. I don't know all that much about the admin/teaching sides of things, but from what I saw Postgresql + PHP + better initial design considerations + a few good coders would have done wonders for a fraction of the $$. At that time we also had wind of other schools having similar trouble with Peoplesoft.

Perhaps the system got better over time, but I can't help wondering why Peoplesoft is so dominant in such situations - do people have better experiences with them they can report? My experience with it was admittedly very light (in the form of rather useless and highly non-intuitive grade reports) but if that was a sample of their standard work quality the market should be begging for competition.

Re:Ah, yes... Peoplesoft

[hey!]

Why is any vendor of proprietary software more successful than its competitors?

Because it has the longest punch list. It's very hard to select software which offers "less" for the same price.

And once you've handed the vendor a pile of dough, you can never afford to admit defeat. Spending a ton of money on a system like this is like getting married, with the hidden proviso that if divorce follows, your erstwhile partner gets to keep your penis. The result is nobody is going to be candid; they just keep the denial rolling long enough to retire or move on.

The truth is, the most important thing in any IT shop is the selection and management of the staff. If you have enough good people in the right places, things tend to work. Massive "enterprise" systems seem like a shortcut to success, embodying all kinds of know-how that you (as a short sighted skinfint manager) are not willing to pay for. But there aren't any shortcuts. Bringing in a system like this probably also means spending more on staffing, at least in the short run. Software or no, takes years to make things work better and cheaper, at least if you don't want to have embarassing failures along the way.

Back in the 70s through the early 90s, the view of the software business was that it was like owning a printing press that printed money: you just cranked the duplicator, and value came out for a little more than the cost of the media. Now that the era of exponential computer adoption is past, software is a service business, with typical service business margins. Caveat emptor, then: when you buy software, you are entering into a long term relationship with the vendor.

I've always said

[rpillala]

Payroll won't pay you if they have a choice.

Our school system recently made a transition from individual electronic gradebook servers per school to centralized gradebook servers serving the district. The troubles they didn't foresee in testing came from not having actual teachers around to place a realistic load on the system. Not just in the number of concurrent users, but the varying operating systems in place at schools, the varying age of equipment from room-to-room, and other factors have popped up. I'm responsible at my school site for handling people's issues with the system, but I had no part in the decision to move to a centralized server. It makes sense though, I just wish it had been set up in parallel for a while last year so that we wouldn't have all this failure to deal with that could have been anticipated.

The worst case with our gradebooks is that we get a little behind putting scores into the computer. No one's livelihood is at stake. I would hope that with something like payroll they could have tried it in parallel for a while to catch issues like the ones they're having now.

PeopleSoft?

[CompMD]

PeopleShaft not working right? Thats unpossible!

Seriously, PeopleSoft sucks fiercely unless you have an army of people spending thousands of manhours on it to make it work right. At the university I attended, when they rolled out PeopleSoft to do EVERYTHING (including tuition, enrollment, etc.) all kinds of random errors would screw up what you were trying to do, and the university's stance was "oops, sorry." This was their stance even if it meant you couldn't enroll in a class (or couldn't drop a class), or pay your tuition on time.

Re:Par for the course

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, it's not like they're trying to model global weather systems or something. Sometimes, you honestly could've fooled me.

I don't work for SAP, but I do work as a developer for an ERP competitor to them. Some of the business flows are seriously convoluted. Tack on a few layers of customer specific adaptations, and it's pretty close to spaghetti.

Luckily it appears our framework is a lot more modern than SAP's. While we may lose the initial sale to SAP, it's not all that rare we're asked to deliver a few years later when SAP still hasn't managed to get things up and running. I'm guessing lack of flexibility in their framework is at least part of the reason.

Peoplesoft is a steaming pile of crap

[myc]

I don't know much about the innards of Peoplesoft, but speaking as a faculty end user, it is a steaming pile of crap. The current implementation of Peoplesoft running across all 23 campuses of the California State University system is estimated to have cost over $700 million at this point.

Just as one example, this fall students were being booted out of classes they legitimately enrolled in, because the financial aid module could not talk to the enrollment module properly, leading the system to think that these students did not pay tuition. Our department office spent the better part of the last 3 weeks manually re-enrolling everyone.

There is a state auditor's report on the CSU selection and implementation of Peoplesoft, which began back in 1997 (too lazy to link to it but Google will find you the .pdf). After skimming through it, I couldn't believe that no CSU executives were not indicted on insider trading and corruption charges.

LAUSD problems

[msaavedra]

My wife is a teacher in LAUSD. Her paycheck has been screwed up on a number of occasions. She no longer knows how much she is supposed to be paid, because her salary is now different every month. The worst case was when the district deposited her check (direct deposit into the checking account), then withdrew every penny of it the next day with no warning. Why did they do this? No one has been able to explain it. The following day, they deposited the exact same amount back into the account. Even when we have the money in the account now, we feel like we can't touch it.

Since this has affected us personally, and since I'm an I.T. professional, I've been following this pretty closely. Here is some more information that wasn't talked about in the article:

• David Brewer, the LAUSD superintendent, has no experience in education. As far as I can tell, he has little experience in business too. He was a career military man, and probably is used to things like the fabled $600 toilet seat, $300 screw drivers, etc. To be fair, the problems started before he took office, but he has been woefully unable to deal with this situation. To make matters worse, despite his inexperience, he makes even more money than the last superintendent.
• There is suspicion of corruption in the contracting process. Deloitte, the company who got the job, were not able to get this contract legally, because they were too expensive. Someone in the district hired a lobbyist who got our state legislature to pass a law changing this. The day after the law changed, Deloitte was hired. Through an amazing coincidence, the aformentioned lobbyist is also employed by Deloitte. I think that as things progress, we'll find people in the district with other ties to Deloitte.
• The last contract negotiations between the teachers union and the district was very ugly. The union hired a real firebrand to negotiotiate, there was nearly a strike, lots of inflammatory stuff was said in the media, and lots of bad blood was created. Eventually the district was forced to give in to most of the union demands. I wouldn't be surprised if the district is dragging their heels on getting this fixed simply out of spite.
• Aside from that, the slowness also seems due to everyone going into CYA mode, probably because there is plenty of blame to assign to all parties involved. I suspect that when everything comes out, we'll see that not only was Deloitte incompetent in managing this project, but also that the district did not give proper specifications of what they needed. After all, the important part for Deloitte and their cronies in the district (the part that needed lots of thought, effort, and creativity) was figuring out how extract as much money from the taxpayers as possible. As for the actual project, who cares?

Re:Par for the course

[DarkOx]

I realize that SAP is complex, and that payroll is complex. You apparently don't realize that at all. I have spent most of my short career working with ERP systems or doing work very tightly coupled to ERP systems like activity based costing. If you every start doing that sort of work and talk to business folk behind it you will be amazed at how often you find yourself saying "You must be kidding" when they start explaining all the rules and exceptional cases to you. Then you run in to the legacy issues, and how the old system they used in the eighties stored time in 27ths of a second and for that reason you have if not store at least present data that way because those of the numbers the desk workers are used to seeing and it has the tie out with the data wharehouse which has always be loaded that way.

Oh and payroll is something you can't get wrong. Quite possibly more so then any other business function has to be right the first time. Fixing mistakes is hard and extreemly costly, and that is before any legal exposure is considered. You will also find your self working with the group of business people who are the least trusting, and first to loose confidence, for very good reasons.

If you think ERP is anything like a database and some spread sheets you have never been close to ERP. I admint its not climate modeling, or interstellar navigation but its not simple.

Re:Par for the course

[sunwukong]

they should've used one of those OSS ERP systems that simply don't exist. Compiere
Tiny ERP
opentaps
But I guess they'd never find out about these projects because a service that lets you search the web using keywords doesn't exist, either.

Pretty soon it all adds up to real money...

[jwiegley]

PFFFFFT! $132M... $17M... $60M... Bah! Nickels and dimes! Come see me and bitch when your school system's people soft implementation has cost you $800M+.

[wikipedia]The California State University system adopted PeopleSoft in the early 2000s. The university spent $500 million on this system in a process so deficient that it resulted in an investigation and a rebuke by the state legislature. The Report of the California State Auditor criticised the University, amongst other things, for not having a business case for the implementation. When asked why it never conducted a formal return-on investment analysis on the CMS project, the university explained that the magnitude of potential savings estimated by its consultants, IBM and Pacific Partners Consulting Group (Pacific Partners), led them to believe that such a formal analysis was unnecessary.

And yes we bitch that the state doesn't fund our university well enough. That we should be given more funding. When, in fact, we are given enough money. Our administrators, chancellors and trustees just choose to waste it in the most inefficient ways possible.

And don't get me started on the lack of business case. That's just S.O.P.

Re:Par for the course

[JimBobJoe]

This is especially true in the public sector

I got to watch a Peoplesoft HR implementation at a large public university in the late 90s. It was really the first time that Peoplesoft was being deployed for university HR purposes.

It was a painful, ugly and almost absurdly expensive transition (we're talking an initial budget of $10-12 million, but a final cost more in the $100-120 million range.) Over and over again I heard complaints that there was no particular way of doing X in the Peoplesoft software--the unique payroll setup of a public university wasn't taken into account.

This wasn't helped by the odd client access method--running the Peoplesoft software on NT 3.51 servers, and then having users access it via Citrix Winframe. At the time that probably seemed like a good idea--and perhaps today it would be a lot more stable and fast, but back then it was a slow as molasses.