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."
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."
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.
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.
Re:Ah, yes... Peoplesoft (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Par for the course (Score:1, Informative)
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 (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:
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:3, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Par for the course (Score:3, Informative)
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.