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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."
In my experience, this kind of thing is typical.
It's almost a rule that the more expensive the software, the more likely it is to really and truly SUCK.
It's also a rule that the bigger the company/organization/school district/whatever, the less likely it is that "technology" purchasing decisions are made by someone who actually HAS A CLUE about technology. The reason being, of course, that technology is too expensive to let the "tech" people get involved with the purchasing process.
Like I said, this is all par-for-the-course in the American corporate world. And school districts/government organizations are even WORSE.
Considering we pay her half what a BA in the business world would make because she works in education.. her quitting is not a option for my district.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
One of the main problems facing these ERP systems is that they try to be far too generic. Site-specific functionality is jammed into the overall framework in the form of modules. Unfortunately, business logic is often very complex, and so it doesn't always fit well into these modules. This can lead directly to hackish attempts to circumvent the limitations imposed by the ERP modules system, which often leads directly to faulty software.
Another problem affecting lower-end ERP solutions is the use of data abstraction layers like Hibernate. These layers separate the application developers from the databases that are actually storing the data being manipulated by the ERP system. Since the developers tend to now avoid writing SQL statements, they lose sight of the real relationships between the data stored within the database tables. Losing sight of these relationships means that the developers often take obtuse, roundabout ways to getting to data through the data abstraction layer, when the same data could be obtained in a few lines of SQL.
It's common to think that ERP or some other big software is going to be the silver bullet for all of your company's problems. In fact, that is just throwing money at the issue.
ERP implementations are meant to mirror existing business processes. If your business processes are ass to begin with, and there is no change before an ERP roll-out, your business will still experience the same issues.
All this "blame the ERP vendor" stuff is crap. I blame the people who are running the system and poorly implemented it.
The game.
But it is VERY difficult to "mirror existing business processes" because of TWO things:
#1. Duplicating a human decision process is difficult in software - the human may have 50+ years of experience that s/he cannot articulate to the analyst. Which leads to
#2. The process and business logic that is actually implemented is what the ANALYST believes should be implemented and how it should be implemented. (and then how it is written by the coder and whether it passes the test cases (and whether any test cases were written and tested)).
It's all about the edge cases. Depending upon your market, your "edge cases" could be almost all of your business (and profits).
This is one the biggest scam in business history. You get some company to buy into a huge software package, hire armies of consultants, schedule months of meetings, and they end up with something worse than what they had before, only poorer.
I am a SAP Integrator (not on the functional side, but on technology - SAP Basis).
1. There is nothing wrong with the software or architecture design.
2. SAP is highly customizable to customer's requirements.
3. Projects are normally rushed thru without proper planning.
4. Lack of quality SAP specialists. These days, SAP consultants are commodotized.
It is difficult to identify a good consultant. It appears consultants without relevant
industry experience were deployed (SAP+Government+Education+HR background)
5. Testing, testing and testing !! I think corners were cut here.
Go identify the culprits.
This brings up an important point: organizations don't bother to try to simplify their business rules. Complex business rules make life harder even IF the computer does work because people still have to verify the results and answer questions from users (paycheck receivers). Beurocrats build up layers of messy rules like a desk or fridge that nobody ever cleans. Until real AI is invented, it may be unrealistic for a computer to magically fix it all. If such a system is too complex for regular payroll clerks to understand and navigate, then it is probably beyond automation also.
Table-ized A.I.
And what does ERP mean? I checked wikipedia, but none of it's possible meanings of ERP seemed appropriate. I'm just going to pick one that sounds intestering, though.
I don't know why these schools can't pick a decent Erotic Roleplaying system. There are so many good ones to choose from, and it's very important that we get these students involved with one of them, so they can practice and know what to expect in the real world.
> As for $300 hammers, someone connected to the California school system, or married to someone who is, should SHUT THE FUCK UP when is comes to criticizing government waste.
Dude, that is so out of line it isn't even funny. First of all, "someone connected to the California school system" is a pretty broad brush. I'm going to presume you weren't including parents and students in with that, and probably not volunteers. Still you're talking about literally hundreds, if not thousands, of school districts (LAUSD just happens to be by far the largest), each of which is administered and run fairly independently of the others. You're throwing in the kindergardens in with the university system, etc. Secondly, most of the people who are part of the system are actually victims of the waste rather than causes of it. I know plenty of teachers who spend their own money (how beautifully inefficient is that eh? spending after tax money on something that should be an expense, but not being able to expense it) buying supplies for their classroom in order to compensate for inadequate supplies (all the while staring at a $2000 computer in their classroom that collects dust because a contractor hasn't show up yet to hook it up). They deal with "lockdowns" that occur once a month because someone in the neighbourhood (often one of the students) exchanges gunfire, and of course they feel horribly unsafe when that happens because most of the security money is spent on metal detectors, which provide little to no protection once a gunfight has actually broken out. They deal with students whose attendance can best be described as "erratic", often because they move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood (or even state to state or country to country) multiple times over the course of the year. On top of that they get to deal with parents who are completely uninvolved in their kids schooling, all the while they are expected to produce results. Those parents that do show up may very well not speak english and in fact may speak any of over 100 languages as their native tongue (and I'm not even talking about the ones that can't read or write, because that is a comparatively minor impediment for a teacher to overcome) and their kids may be similarly disadvantaged.
It's fun to sit back and take pot shots from the sidelines without actually getting involved, but if you get down in the trenches and learn what is actually going on, you'll find the problem is very complex and way more fucked up than you can possibly imagine. No question there is waste, but part of the frustrating aspect of the situation is most of the people involved in the system can do little to correct it.
The irony, is that the article really just reads like the typical article you read about ERP deployments at any business. The only thing that makes it especially tragic is that it it involves the school system. It is *normal* with ERP deployments to have the whole thing be massively over budget, massively behind schedule, have the bidding process be entirely corrupted (heck, it is hard for it not to be, as it is terribly difficult to get direct access to the innards of the systems), and for the whole thing to be strung around a consulting company's neck (typically they deserve half the blame, but far from all), and they're willing to take it because they are laughing all the way to the bank as they bill their way through the fiasco.
If you think this whole mess wouldn't have happened without California's education system being involved, you are profoundly ill informed.
sigs are a waste of space