Teachers Give ERP Implementations Failing Grades 169
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."
Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Teachers should be familiar with that concept. Remember, when someone isn't producing results, it's not their fault -- it's that you're not throwing enough cash at the problem!
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You got it, pal.
Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Par for the course (Score:4, Insightful)
IT DOESN'T MATTER. The software should work. The customizations needed should be relatively EASY to implement. I mean, it's not like they're trying to model global weather systems or something. SAP is really nothing more than a big fat database/spreadsheet. They should be able to make it work. There is no excuse.
Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's rewind the clock a bit. I have a book on my desk, which I recite a short passage out of every time management wants us to computerize a mess. The book is "Businessman's Guide To Microcomputers", by accounting firm Deloitte Haskins and Sells - published November 1982.
A short excerpt from chapter 14, "Common first time buyer pitfalls"
If you're going "You must be kidding" frequently, you're just computerising a mess. Management needs to be prepared to re-engineer the business, not just throw overpriced software and multiple cores at it and hope it sticks.
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Not only that when you model weather if you are off by one or two percent nobody gets too upset. With payroll it is a very different story.
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Tiny ERP [tinyerp.org]
opentaps [opentaps.org]
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.
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Compiere [monster.com]
Tiny ERP [monster.com]
opentaps [monster.com]
Just for comparison: Sap [monster.com]
I'd argue that (Score:5, Interesting)
Neither SAP nor Peoplesoft suck.
Suck is sort of a generic term but when it comes to specific customer installations go I've never seen one go smoothly...ever. Never seen one come in on budget, either. The best thing I can say for either one of them is they're better than Seibel.
I have seen the reps leapfrog over the technical department to pitch the executives, glossing over the implementation and cost issues. Seen them give out customer testimonials that didn't hold up to investigation, low ball hardware requirements and suggest that the IT people were well-meaning but out of their depth.
I also disagree that it's something that couldn't be custom built for less money and deliver longer and more reliable service. Now if you mean having EDS or Dell Consulting build it for you then, yes, you're completely correct in that context.
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That is what every sales rep tries to do. In technical matters, particularly those where IT expertise would be valuable to managers making a purchase decision, the sales rep will attempt to bypass IT because he knows that if there are any flaws in the product or bad reviews from previous customers then the IT department is the most likely to uncover them. The goal of the sales rep is to close a sale,
Complexity Tax bites man (Score:3, Insightful)
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Federal regs, financial best practices, laws, contracts, etc.
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No, all these hundreds of millions of dollars of failed ERP systems are attempts to replace mainframe / midrange systems that works far better than any buzzword bonanza they can come up with.
rd
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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
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About 55,000 students, 25,000 staff. (That includes multiple campuses as well as a hospital system.)
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It's conventional wisdom that licensing is 10% of the total cost of the introduction of an ERP.
What people seem to forget is the realisation why you have ERPs in the first place: They are there to replace the old business processes. So introduction of an ERP is equivalent to a complete reorganisation of the company, or it is wasted money.
Imagine the introduction of a CNC machine in a handcraft metal shop. And then project the picture to an organisation which switches to an ERP.
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What people seem to forget, specially ERP consultors, is the realisation why you have ERPs in the first place: They are sure there *NOT* to replace the old bussiness processes. Think it that way and the project is DOOMED. ERP is there to make your *current* bussiness process faster, cheaper and more controllable. Nothing more (but nothing less). Gold rule in IT: never
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I've been on good implemantations and bad ones and if it's one thing bad ones have in common, it's that they've tried to replicate the old system not just in its overall results but step by step and word for word. And nine times out of ten the guilty party is whover programmed the old system.
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Please have a look to some dictionary and look after differences between "processes" and "procedures". Surely, just too many times an ERP implatantion is seen as a good chance to substitute older processes thought to be faulty with new ones (which, by the way, tend to be no better); after all, we are going to change procedures, so it seems a good
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Perhaps you should look to [sic] a dictionary too: implementation, symptoms.
Says who? Tell me how tell me how placing a customer order on hold, waiting one day for the overnight interface run to accounting, one day for the overnight interface run from accounting and one day to rekey the data manually becuase something wasn't propoerly synchronised before deciding that
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Oh hang on... theres "consulting costs" involved... Thats where SAP/PS "certified" consultants come in to "customise" the software... In that case its probably 100 family cars worth.
They probably should of gone with Microsoft Access HR database template and hired a couple of VBA programmers. And at this point, you think Im joking....
Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh don't get me started.... I have experience with both PeopleSoft and SAP, and I am not impressed by either.
My employer has implemented PeopleSoft and it's been nothing but a nightmare. Inaccurate accounts, never quote being sure how much money you have in an account, and the web interface.... It's like something out of 1997! This is 2007, and if Google and other companies can make sleek AJAX interfaces, you'd think on a multi-million dollar system like PeopleSoft they could at least build one that looks as though it's from this decade!
As for SAP, I administer a SAP system for a friend's company, we're talking a company of about $1-2 million in sales a year. And as I learn more about this system, I shake my head more in disbelief. I've spent weekends having to rebuild new laptops they've bought with XP because the software simply doesn't work under Vista, and the estimated compatibility date we keep getting is 1 year+. You might say that's Vista's fault, and to a degree it is, however when I learn about how their authentication works, and how it depends on Vista's authentication for their client-server model, plus their own internal authentication I wonder how these people ever got their CS degrees. The clients access MS SQL DIRECTLY, not through a nice integrity maintaining server process. That is such a huge no-no if you want good audit trails and data integrity, you do not let the clients directly access the database!
I often wonder, if I knew more about accounting, I bet I could put together a startup and make a piece of software which cleans their clocks. It is complex, but doable, without interfaces out of last century and authentication protocols which depend upon the eccentricities of different versions of an operating system. If someone took on this challenge they could be very, very, very rich just by building a usable system that doesn't require millions in consulting fees.
And yes, those SAP consultants, I can see my friend's blood pressure go up whenever I tell him he have to call them for assistance on some arcane matter which is far overly complex for what is trying to be accomplished. I guess the easier way to become very rich is to be a SAP/PeopleSoft consultant, if you can swallow your morals.
SAP is one of the better ones (Score:2)
I once worked for a consulting firm that though there was going to be big bucks with Siebel. Nearly became a Siebel consultant. Fortunately the company went under before I got into that too deep.
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My employer has implemented PeopleSoft and it's been nothing but a nightmare. Inaccurate accounts, never quote being sure how much money you have in an account, and the web interface.... It's like something out of 1997! This is 2007, and if Google and other companies can make sleek AJAX interfaces, you'd think on a multi-million dollar system like PeopleSoft they could at least build one that looks as though it's from this decade!
No they cannot just build another UI on top off their system. There is no such thing as a seperate UI in these old (mostly 4GL) systems, a new UI generally means either somthing which isn't much more than a new skin on the same UI or, to do it right, a complete rewrite of the whole system. And when you talk about an ERP system which took about a decade to build you can guess how much enthousiasm you will find within your management when you propose a rewrite.
I often wonder, if I knew more about accounting, I bet I could put together a startup and make a piece of software which cleans their clocks. It is complex, but doable, without interfaces out of last century and authentication protocols which depend upon the eccentricities of different versions of an operating system. If someone took on this challenge they could be very, very, very rich just by building a usable system that doesn't require millions in consulting fees.
You probably can, I'm sure I can. But it w
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My employer has implemented PeopleSoft and it's been nothing but a nightmare. Inaccurate accounts, never quote being sure how much money you have in an account, and the web interface.... It's like something out of 1997! This is 2007, and if Google and other companies can make sleek AJAX interfaces, you'd think on a multi-million dollar system like PeopleSoft they could at least build one that looks as though it's from this decade!
PeopleSoft may not be the greatest, but at least their 1997-ish web interface works in browsers other than IE. Unlike these jokers [authoria.com], which my employer recently started using. The site that they set up for my company is so horribly broken there's no chance of getting it to work in FireFox. But somehow, IE ignores enough of the errors that it all works. I'll take a "primitive" but working interface over a fancy but non-functional interface any day of the week!
I often wonder, if I knew more about accounting, I bet I could put together a startup and make a piece of software which cleans their clocks.
While I don't think writing an ERP solution f
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I'm not sure you should be running a production SAP system on a laptop. Now you probably mean the sapgui frontend, but your inability to distinguish the two pretty much renders your opini
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Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
- failure to scope the project correctly.
- scope creep, as everyone rushes to get their own stamp on the project.
- on the other side, scope reduction, once some pinhead in accounting realises how much the scope creep is costing.
- implementing for IT instead of the end user.
- allowing either IT or business sole authority in software purchase decisions. Either way it's a guaranteed disaster.
- instead of improving current processes, projects attempt to replace/revamp said processes completely, with little to no impact from the people who actually use them.
- lack of training. Nine times out of ten when a project runs over budget, the first area cut is the end user training.
- cheaping out on the implementation. I've watched companies spend millions on software licenses, then shortchange on the implementation.
- rushed implementation. Instead of planning and implementing on a schedule, the project managers fix a timeline and say "get it done in this timeframe", completely ignoring how long it SHOULD take.
I could add more, but this is just part of it.
Re:Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Have a manager in a government bureacracy or at a director-level that the vendor takes out for "business" golf make the decision.
2. Ensure that manager has no repercussions for his decision and probably isn't even in the same position when the project is supposed to go live.
3. Have the vendor, with no knowledge of the existing system, come up with a timeline to replace it with their stuff, but "customized".
4. Pay vendor millions in licensing fees. Golf has a very good ROI for big vendors.
5. Pay vendor millions more to supply a few brand new employees who took the vendor's "class" on his product to "customize" it for you, thus making those employees valuable enough to get something of a real job working for someone else later.
6. When the first few milestones are missed, have the vendor add a couple of people to the project that know even less than the original consultants.
7. When things start go even slower, begin to blame the "extra" work that wasn't ever planned for to start with, but is critical to the project.
8. To make up time, cut out any originally required user training.
9. To make up more time, cut out all documentation efforts.
10. To make up more time, cut out all quality assurance efforts and related paperwork.
11. To save time, skip development and testing environments and deploy everything straight to production servers.
12. Switch over to the new system, even though it's not done, hasn't been tested, and no one knows how to use it.
13. Sign a long-term consulting contract with the vendor to pay them for keeping the original consultants on doing "maintenance" for the forseeable future, hoping something will eventually work.
14. Ignore your own staff's original predictions and recommendations and complain about how no one could have predicted that this project could possibbly fail, since the vendor is the "industry leader".
15. ????
16. If you're the vendor, "Profit!!!!" . If you're the original manager, put "Successfully led a $50,000,000 software project" on your resume.
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(State agency which just put in PSoft...)
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To date, we have had no serious issues and users are generally pleased with the result.
This can no longer happen (Score:2)
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I'm not sure how salaried pay could be MORE simple. Starting this school year, I knew exactly how much I was going to be paid (gross) and was able to calculate
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Salaried vs. Hourly
Overtime for hourly
Accrued comp time for hourly
academic year salaries vs. calendar year salaries
vacation & sick accruals and rates
pre-tax vs. post-tax deductions
complex deduction rates for things like life insurance
people paid off multiple accounts
people paid off project money off multiple accounts based on what they work on
time-reporting and approval (often part of payroll)
leave request and approval (often part of payroll)
Terminations:
wow oh wow can this ge
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Software vendors need to be straight with their customers and describe how much time/money their systems take to customize and customization issues should be spelled
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Also people are commenting here that the automa
Re:Par for the course (Score:4, Interesting)
I am quite convinced that the Chicago Public School system does not have the expertise to run such a system, nor the cash flowing through the system to justify having purchased it.
The software is not wrong, it is just being used in the wrong environment. Probably some salesman needs to be fired (out of a cannon; into the sun). The salesman's creed is: "The right customer is everyone, and the right product is the one I'm selling." This is absolute bullocks.
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The salesman probably doesn't care if he does get fired, people get fired or laid off in sales all of the time. If he is a true mercenary then he will quickly find another position (probably higher paying or better commission) someplace else and repeat the process. I knew a guy like that once, extremely good at what he did, which was selling things, but completely without moral compunctions...all that mattered to him was the sale an
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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In the schools, it is so much different. So many of the costs are externalized, usually by making teachers and administrators work off the clock. T
Educational I/T Problems (Score:2)
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.
Yep. But why don't we say it like it really is. Gross management incompetence. I have consulted for a major college and could not believe the lack of depth in the head of I/T. Totally freaking clueless to to I/T and industry best practices. Not one molecule in his head was into I/T and being irrational and political type no hope too either. A freshman i
Happening elsewhere too (Score:4, Informative)
"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."
Too much modularity! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I'll get back to you when I decide to work on my MD.
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Yes, but that's defeating the purpose of it. It is claimed that it "hides SQL" from OOP programmers. The parent's assertion is that hiding from the SQL prevents an understanding of the data and schemas, meaning the app developers are programming in the dark, using trial and error and wasteful client-side loops.
Not true. The purpose of an ORM is not to eliminate all SQL from the app. It's to eliminate tedious, repetitive, CRUD sql that doesnt really add value.
They're an 80% solution. They hugely simplify 80% of your db access, make it more consistent. Lets the developer work higher on the abstraction stack, and spend more time solving business problems, not plumbing problems.
It's the same reason why every developer/shop worth their salt always end up with an in-house DAL to automate so much of this anyway.
But
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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.
No no no. Several problems with this.
In the typical case, you are going to have a set of business entity objects that very closely maps 1:1 to the entity tables (not including mapping and join tables).
These BOs have exactly the same relationship with each other than the underlying tables do, and its expressed obviously and explicitly in the class definitions.
Whether you're doing pure, modern OO domain modeling, and then developing the data schema later to
PeopleSoft (Score:2)
Whoa for Deloitte (Score:2)
GIGO! (Score:2)
The OSFA software model is a problem, too, I'm sure, because it often can't be configured to do exactly what's needed for your industry. I have a customer on QuickBooks that stil
Not just in education (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It's even worse than that. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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Trying to mirror exixting processes in detail is a recipe for disaster. You might as well employ Nelson's tactics with aircraft carriers.
Ah, yes... Peoplesoft (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 th
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I think you're ignoring that a lot of those don't apply because these are local systems handling people doing a fairly small list of jobs. Granted, PeopleSoft has to support all the regional differences, but something custom wouldn't. On the technical side, portability becomes a non-issue, so you could actually lean on the particular strengths of the da
I've always said (Score:3, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Suckers (Score:3, Insightful)
Search for "PeopleSoft" and "failure" (Score:2)
Results ... of about 387,000 for: peoplesoft failure.
Some of those hits are irrelevant, but many lead to Peoplesoft horror stories.
Peoplesoft is a steaming pile of crap (Score:5, Informative)
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
LAUSD problems (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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Perhaps he is subject to the same disruptions in the payroll system as everyone else so he makes more in theory, but only when the system doesn't inadvertently pay him less or $0.00
I remember reading once that Deloitte was one of the biggest proponents of project outsourcing so it would not be surprising to me if it comes out in a later investigation of what went wrong that the people responsible fo
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Minor rant here - why on earth do banks allow random people to WITHDRAWL money from an account with no knowledge other than the account number?
It is even worse than letting random people charge a credit card knowing only the account number - at least in that case you have a week or two to pay the bill and the charge can be contested and not paid in
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Calm your rant. They don't.
If you read your direct deposit form, you'll see in addition to providing information for the company to put money into your account, you are also giving authorization for the company to remove money from your account to correct over-payment.
In this case the answer is simple. Don't use direct deposit.
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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 (L
Project Management & SAP Integrator (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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Can someone moderate this funny ?
Thinking? (Score:2)
Some of these problems have little to do with the software itself. Rather, the process was a load of crap from day one with a zillion stupid little rules. Naturally, such rules can turn a fundamentally dead simple process into a giant hairball in an instant.
The give and take in business software should be at the boundary the old process and the new software. That is, developers should have input into the business process side of things. After all, most business programming uses procedural languages, so it
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Sadly, this is not the case.
Many 'penny off' cases, once they happen on accounting papers, will most likely result in at least 10 hour long investigation (think $$ in costs), as every penny must be correct, even if the cost of investigation/corrections greatly exceeds the amount of mistake.
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Really, that depends on the circumstances. If a penny just appears of disappears from a ledger, then yes, it's a nightmare in the accounting world, mostly because if a penny can disappear this month, it could be $100 next month.
I'm talking about cases where something like a paycheck is computed and that ends up a whole penny off. In that case, the check is correctly entered in the register, it's certainly close enough that nobody has a complaint, and the ledger will balance perfectly.
Often enough, busin
More money spent externally then internally? (Score:2)
I wonder how many meetings were made with the schools' operational staff to analyze the payroll system that was in place to take care of all the factors and how much was planning was done to make sure the transition was smooth?
Pretty soon it all adds up to real money... (Score:3, Informative)
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+.
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.
I'm a teacher in the LAUSD (Score:2)
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No, you've had a portion of that money withheld for taxes. At the end of the year, you'll get it all squared away when you actually file and you'll only end up having to pay taxes on the money you've received.
You'll only have paid too much taxes if the discrepancy is not corrected until after january 1, and then only if the extra falls in a higher tax bracket than you usually fall. You can mediate this as well, buy
lack of trained SAP people (Score:2)
Poorly spec'ed. (Score:2)
Ummmmmm, yes. And ........ ?
Where is the graceful failure? We are talking MILLIONS OF DOLLARS spent on this project. And they couldn't come up with any way to overbuild it by 10% or so?
Who really gives a fuck if 10% of your system is "sitting idle for 90-plus percent of the year," if it works perfectly EVERY SINGLE DAY?
We ar
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ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning.
Now, your job is to tell me what that means!
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It means ensuring we have enough anti-matter for the engines.
Chris Mattern
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Basically the ERP system is (or has become) the central system for managing everything from reception of an order through fulfillment of the order. Some systems even include warehouse management and truck scheduling. ERP is an expansion of MRP II, attempting to manage the enterprise activities as a whole where MRP II was attempting to manage inventory and manufactur
Re: (Score:2)