[lbo-talk] ERP scams, was: SAP to double Indian staff to 2,000 in 3 yrs

Tom Roche Tom_Roche at pobox.com
Sat Jul 5 18:00:34 PDT 2003


Dwayne Monroe Sat, 5 Jul 2003 07:15:33 -0700 (PDT) (rearranged)

> SAP projects always seem to require battalion strength coding teams

> to get the thing working at all, let alone meeting the inflated

> claims of the vendor.

They're not alone: a local university where I worked decided to go PeopleSoft ...

> At a large chemical and materials science firm I consulted for

> several years ago, a project to create an SAP 'portal' to all the

> company's information was started by the Chief Information Officer

> (the payoff was supposed to be unheard of collaboration and

> "business intelligence" opportunities...whatever).

The university's IT department's pitch was the above, plus Y2K. But it turned out

* it was easy/cheap to fix date handling in the old mainframe-based

code (and tables--the DBAs had the real fun :-)

* it was hard/slow/expensive to get their PS replacements working

* they maintained (and may still) _two_ sets of systems

* (rumor had it) whenever they got somebody trained to the point where

s/he could contribute productively to the integration effort, PS

would try to hire them away as consultants :-)



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