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US Air Force Scraps ERP Project After $1 Billion Spent
angry tapir writes "The U.S. Air Force has decided to scrap a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) software project after spending $1 billion, concluding that finishing it would cost far too much more money for too little gain. Dubbed the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), the project has racked up $1.03 billion in costs since 2005, 'and has not yielded any significant military capability,' an Air Force spokesman said in a statement. 'We estimate it would require an additional $1.1B for about a quarter of the original scope to continue and fielding would not be until 2020. The Air Force has concluded the ECSS program is no longer a viable option for meeting the FY17 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirement. Therefore, we are canceling the program and moving forward with other options in order to meet both requirements.'"
I'd like to see them implement a CRM system instead
Never look back at the carnage.
Seems that this is a common theme with ERP rollouts-- scope creep tends to get them all in the end. Granted, most organizations seem to wave off long before the $1 billion mark...
They were writing it in Ada and targeting Windows NT 4.
I know lots of programmers who can get the same result for half the price.
From my observations, I've concluded that no organizational group works toward reducing its size, reducing the amount of its discretionary budget, or increasing its accountability for the preceding.
Any exceptions?
Those billions could have put a man on mars, or housed many,many homeless people, or any of a bunch of other uses. When will we realize that most of out debt is crime useless military spending, not social programs?
Silence is a state of mime.
Answered my own question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVRgIXLWDHs
If you're ever near Washington DC, take a stroll through the Air and Space Museum in Dulles. Its much bigger than the one on the Mall. Of particular interest are the many early rocket projects that were cancelled. The plaques all start off telling how awesome the project was and end with "canceled due to cost overruns". There is most certainly a precedent.
...price of oracle shares skyrockets
ERP is a bunch of disparate functions mashed together then held in place with a metric assload of duck tape. It's only natural that if you try to tacle the whole thing at once the result will be a sort of dynamic paralysis where you run back and forth in a nearly random pattern burning money all the way.
Just as well, if you ever manage to build the thing, you'll create paralysis across the entire company if you suddenly drop this chimera on people's desks.
Note, I am NOT claiming that the individual functions aren't necessary nor am I claiming that they shouldn't support common data formats.I am claiming that trying to build the whole thing at once and as a single 'solution' is wrong headed and doomed to failure.
Perfect application of Hanlon's Razor: Not so much a conspiracy to waste money as the worst combination of both world (defense acquisition and enterprise software development). Both fields are very prone to overruns, scope creep, and repeated waste of funds as manager after manager--or contractor after contractor--throws away work to start over again. Another great example is the FAA's version of enterprise software, which is currently at $63.4 BILLION and counting (though, to be fair, it's quite possible the most complicated software project in the world).
Still, there are worse examples--specifically, when these kinds of overruns, violations, and program restarts are done deliberately to ensure continued funding to entrenched players in a limited field and / or to pursue minor permutations on someone's pet dream of a project. This can occur at the cost of throwing away many years and billions of dollars of decent work while never really getting closer to a functioning system. Space Launch System, anyone? (Not a software example, but the line between software and aerospace engineering is a lot thinner than most people realize.)
We tried, but they swift-boated the other guy. I guess we got the president we deserved for that one...
According to your link, it was estimated at 2M and ended up running 66M.. a far cry from 2B but, still a 33x increase in cost so very respectable fail there.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
If only they'd had a better ERP system, they could've planned this project more carefully, and put all those resources to better use.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister.
It manages stuff. People, salaries, suppliers, inventories, clients, payments and whatever else you can think of. In the company I work for we just did a whole school management system (students, teachers, evaluations, etc) on top of OpenERP (python based, AGPL licensed ERP).
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Obama is in charge... the buck stops with him; he's the one who brags about his "kill list"... Oh, wait, this is Slashdot... Obama has a GREAT smile and a cool attitude and nobody is to blame for the drone strikes. Move along, nothing to see here. Dick Cheney is retired so there is no evil to be denounced.
I wouldn't be surprised that the DoD is encouraging this. In this way, each branch picks their own solution because they need to satisfy so many domestic "interests". (Yes, SAP America contributes to political campaigns and PACs, just like every other large ERP company in the US). Besides, the only reason that anyone has been successful is probably because they are sipping more Kool-Aid and sitting in a circle "reassuring" one another.
In what sense do you think ERP is dead? The functions are all required and if you buy best of breed individual packages, you still need to integrate them, so either you do it yourself or you buy the ERP package that is already integrated.
I agree that some decisions can be made to break it up into manageable pieces and accept less efficiency, but with an organization of that size you still have a problem of complexity whether using an ERP package or creating point solutions and integrating them.
ERP is dead because word is on the street: Too many failed or seriously delayed implementations.
I have seen (first hand) too many institutions decide to implement ERP, pay a tremendous amount of cash, and watch it fail. If it ever does get fully implemented (in a way that was originally envisioned) the institutions have spent so much time and effort to get it running that the institutions have lost their focus because senior management was distracted or the cost of full implementation has affected the bottom line. In some cases, the institution was irreparably damaged or failed.(often surpassed by their competition).
In theory, ERP is a wonderful thing. In actuality, it can kill.
Obama does share the blame. I mean he was president during 4 years of that debacle and didn't put it to sleep sooner. In fact, the cutting of it was done by the military itself in order to get a working solution in place to meet the deadlines of a law passed.
You should learn the different between affect and effect. One can effect the other but the other doesn't necessarily affect the one.
When you figure out how they are different, come back and we can talk.
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How is that partisan? *All* recent Thieves-in-Chief blow trillions, what changes is who the main beneficents are.
Dubya: big oil, military contractors
B. Hussein: wall street, big media, big pharma
[would be] Mittens: wall street, wall street, wall street
And Obama's bailout has been more harmful that all recent wars put together. It ensured no financial companies not connected to the main mafia can thrive: they were either bankrupted, bought out or marginalized, while investors received a clear message that their money can be safe if they go with those "too big to fail". And even worse, the wave of bailouts spread to Europe and rest of the word, and shows no signs of subsiding.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
No they don't, because such a thing would be impossible.
Individuals change jobs and when they do, they generally mention their prior experience. Consulting firms have resumeés too, even if they call them "portfolios".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It was a total success then, as these projects are designed to spend money, not actually produce any usable results ...
AccountKiller
Whew, that was close! Can you even imagine if that +$1 billion had fallen into the hands of poor people? (Shudder)
Bullshit. I have been involved in dozens of ERP implementations over the years. The software works. When implementations fail it is always, in my experience, because of the people (i.e. management) making the decisions on how to implement the product.
Me: "Let me show you how Product X handles Accounts Payable"
Client: "That's not how we do it"
Me: "This might be a good opportunity to take a look at your current business practices and see if they can be done in a more efficient way"
Client: "But we've always done it this way"
Me: "Why?"
Client "Dunno...just always have. And I doubt that the team is willing to change"
Me: "Ok, we can customize the product to make it work the way you want but it's going to take more time and money. And when you do an upgrade later on there will be implications as well"
Client: "Fine. Just make it work the way we do it now"
And so it goes. Time and again I see clients go out and buy an expensive ERP system only to customize the bejezus out of it to make it look exactly like the systems they are retiring. They are not open to better business practices. Too many political headwinds.
What does this say about these clowns in the Air Force? It takes them 10 years and $1.03B to realize that the project is going to fail? On an original budget of $88M? One of the big problems with trying to shoehorn a best practice ERP system into a large government institution is that often they employ worst practices. They won't, or can't, change them so you have to end up rewriting the product to fit their ass backwards ways. The whole purpose of implementing an ERP system is to replace aging, stove-piped systems with modern integrated systems. It can work well if it's implemented properly and the right decisions are made along the way. But it's not a magic pill.
It isn't because it sucks... it is the fact that it needs a champion to be successful, and in a large organization, that champion needs to be a large number of people.
We deployed an ERP system for our small business last year. The core functionality was done previously in Quickbools and various Excel spreadsheets. We spent about $4k per employee on it.
Now we have a system that requires more ongoing money and effort than our old workflow, and for at least 40% of the process still needs to be done in Excel.
But, we can get information faster now, and I have a dashboard showing cash, AP, AR aging, and manpower utilization one click away. This basic functionality was worth about $2-3k/person to management, so now the challenge is getting more of the back workflow incorporated over time.
And our "champion" sits and shops online most of the time he is supposed to work on our objectives. Better focus and we would have been closer to budget and goals.
BING! BING! BING!
We have a winner. I am seeing this very poli-drama being played out right now at my institution. The multi-decade tenured staff will not change from business processes implemented to fit a bad system bought 3 decades ago; and will not listen because they don't have to.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
When a country is trillions in debt its all just fictional amounts of money anyways.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
1 Billion wasted, but remember people, those entitlement programs need to be cut! They're a waste of money! Private insurance companies have overheads of 20% while the government insurance has around 4%, but lets gut entitlements anyway.... I wish we lived in a data driven world....
While I hear what you're saying, government entities, and especially the military, are also subject to legal requirements that they not do things in certain ways, or have unique requirements not accounted for in a 'best practices' system.
Just as often it's the contractors trying to cut corners, over promising, getting lawyers to weasel them out of contract agreements.
You're assumption the ERP = better business process is wrong. Sometime entrenched process are there for a reason, often a legal reason. Sadly the people who knew that reason have left and no one wanted to spend the money to hire someone to properly record it so they don't know. And they continue to not know until the begin to replace it. Once the agree to replace it they start spending money on the process and people can look into them, only to find out things like "WE have a contract to do it a certain way, or legal requirements mean we have to have this.
In this state we have to track workers hours this specific way. on and on.
When thinking of getting an ERP system, you need to investigate if you actually need on first. Too often ti s "This stuff is 'old;" so lets replace it becasue I want something new.
And ERP system is a box, the real world systems are a blob. Trying to fit those together is difficult and I question any process that doesn't involves 2 year of seriously looking at the current methods before coming up with a plan. after that THEN take bids to discuss which ERP system to get.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I used to be a programmer for the Air Force, and I can tell you that the development process is not agile at all. The Air Force, because it's primarily lead by people who used to fly planes, treats every product development as though they were developing an airframe or weapon. Until people who understand software are put in charge of such matters, we'll continue to see stupid stuff like this happen. This type of thing happens more often than you may expect, just not quite to this incredible scale (by which I mean it is not that uncommon for a piece of software to be contracted out, only to get it back way past schedule and way over budget in a completely crippled and useless state, at which point it becomes the job of Air Force programmers to try to hammer it into a useful form).
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Here in Seattle the transit system paid to write their own DVR software for video recordings on the trains, and then proceeded to write a different DVR package for the buses. Why? Because the project specs, as edited by the political flunkies near the end of the process, prohibited COTS solutions. Actually specified proprietary hardware and proprietary software in both cases. Of course delivered it cost twice as much for half the utility of existing products on the market, but the consultants and contractors were happy so I guess that's what counts.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin