6 ms·

I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything

I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the CTO (my boss) made it clear that we strongly felt this would not only go way over budget, but ultimately fail as a project. Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor. After the CTO and I expressed our concerns about the scale of the project and the sheer amount of functionality involved, the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" and were more than prepared, which was music to the ears of the CFO. Daily 2-3 hour meetings followed (for many months) to define the scope of the project. Within each meeting I sort of zoned out because it became very obvious that no only did the vendor not understand the scale of the work involved, but had started cutting corners everywhere/leaving out crucial functionality, and this was just the scoping stage, no development had even started yet. I eventually departed the company but kept in contact with the CTO and learned that after 5 years (project was scoped for 2), the migration was abandoned costing multiple millions of dollars with nothing to show for it.

thih9 2y ago
What happened to the CFO?
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Hmmm, maybe check his LinkedIn where he brags about the successful transition and ERP migration he led at that company.
  - permalac 2y ago
    That happened in my company. The CIO left bragging about implementing itil on servicenow. What they did was replacing RT for servicenow, and only for some ticketing queues. Nothing else, no change management, no cmdb, only an incident and non standard requests queues. 128k/ year, while RT still runs in a VM for all the other ticketing queues. Lots of powerpoints.
- frontalier 2y ago
  probably got hired by the vendor
89vision 2y ago
> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot because they're too good at selling their own innocence.
  - talldatethrow 2y ago
    I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to features. Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time. Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea so good it had REAL PMF, and made that. But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.
    - tomcam 2y ago
      Amazing story. Love your honesty. Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?
      - talldatethrow 2y ago
        It really wouldn't solve the main problem which is that the product itself isn't really needed or that great, code quality aside.
notatoad 2y ago
>The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.
- ZiiS 2y ago
  Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and especially especially if it is being done by the most expensive contractors.
  - notatoad 2y ago
    yes, the key is to always have some sort of migration happening so every problem can be addressed by saying "this will be resolved after the new ERP is rolled out"
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      And you can decline to do literally any piece of work because you need to focus on the migration. Perfect scheme.
      - 8b16380d 2y ago
        Or “it’s best to wait till the migration complete before our team needs to do anything”
  - highwaylights 2y ago
    The latter half of your sentence suggests this project may actually have been a roaring success (for the vendor).
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Depends on the vendor's goals. If it's to fatten and butcher a pig, and never see any future work from them, sure. If the vendor is hoping to have a sustained profitable relationship then not so much.
blantonl 2y ago
Consulting: If you're not part of the solution, be part of the problem.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Or to put it in other terms, the boxer who throws the fight also gets paid very well.
rm445 2y ago
That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.
- calvinmorrison 2y ago
  I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
  - enraged_camel 2y ago
    I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When people migrate from one system to another, they try to make the new system work exactly the way the original system does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than half the cost (and time span) of the migration.
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      "We hate everything about our system, get us a new one" "We want the new system to work exactly like our old one" It's probably not worth the money...
      - drekipus 2y ago
        I haven't pieced those together but of course they go hand in hand. I had one guy want me to recreate Microsoft word, worts and all, because his current Word wasn't doing it for him
TecoAndJix 2y ago
Hershey? https://pemeco.com/a-case-study-on-hersheys-erp-implementation-failure-the-importance-of-testing-and-scheduling/ https://pemeco.com/a-case-study-on-hersheys-erp-implementati...
- client4 2y ago
  The nice thing about consulting at Hershey is that they have candy closets where you can grab what you like, it occasionally includes new demo candy. And the whole town smells like chocolate.
mixedCase 2y ago
Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.
- jmole 2y ago
  No one gets credit for "I told you so" - look at it this way, you didn't have the skill at the time to make the company listen to you.
  - joshuahutt 2y ago
    How could you, in such a case?
    - jmole 2y ago
      I don't know, and maybe there was no solution. Just offering a different perspective.
      - joshuahutt 2y ago
        Some things seem inevitable. I've really run myself through the wringer trying to figure out "what could I have done to achieve a better outcome for everyone involved." I guess success and failure are both group efforts.
    - elwell 2y ago
      short the stock
    - nilamo 2y ago
      They ignored the CTO on an issue that was 100% tech based. There was no winning, the board decided to ignore the person they hired to make that sort of decision for them.
- nick7376182 2y ago
  Better to write "managed critical scoping phase of $xx migration". Not your fault the company priorities later changed and it wasn't completed!
anonymouse008 2y ago
Change this from ERP to POS and you've scripted 9/10ths of the pains for many quick service restaurant chains. Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!? They still can't get out of the wet paper bag, because otherwise "we'll someone might start selling candy or something unapproved" > we'll isn't that's what your franchise liaisons and agreements are for?! I'm just beside myself. I'm so hyped on this because this one 'immovable problem' prevents me from having API access to my locations accounts. Everything just hurts. /rant
- bombcar 2y ago
  I swear the only way to get an ERP or POS change to work is to start a competitor using the new solution and wait for them to acquire you. And then live forever with two systems running side by side.
- canadianfella 2y ago
  [dead]
- invalidlogin 2y ago
  Would you mind breaking down the situation in a little more detail? Not my field and I find your story interesting.
  - cutemonster 2y ago
    I also don't totally understand, what's a TIN for example (Taxpayer Identification Number?) and why is it making money? (Don't taxes go to the state?)
    - curious_curios 2y ago
      Yeah, it’s the identifier the government uses to attribute income for, and hence calculate the resulting taxes. In this case it sounds like a midsize business is using some random guy’s number, so the tax authorities are under the impression there’s a guy pulling in millions personally, and a company with no income. Given that individuals and companies get taxed differently in many different jurisdictions concurrently this will be a mess to untangle.
justinclift 2y ago
Was SAP or IBM the external vendor? :)
thefourthchime 2y ago
Story as old as time. It's a second system, they rarely work. The only hope is to come up with something small and exciting the a new generation moves too. Then you can build it to become the new thing. Trying to build a total second system is nearly impossible if it's big and old.
callwhendone 2y ago
>I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I despise working in corporate america.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > I despise working in corporate america. America might lead the way, but corporate anything, anywhere is pretty terrible.
dxxth 2y ago
I bet it was Oracle, SAP, or IBM. The hydraheaded horror of enterprise bloated licenses. I feel this on a deep level since the ERP system at our company is in the middle of moving to one of these big vendors and so much is simply not working out, extending timelines and development cycles. Cost only goes up and ROI is pushed out beyond the horizon. PLM is equally bad and a horror show of legacy vendors trying to sell their solutions with the promise of customizability. Again the small, more modern players in the PLM space are constantly ignored for the big legacy ones and it turns out those legacy platforms even in their latest iterations are inflexible at best or downright hellish at worst. The reason behind all of this? Service contracts and vendor lock-in are the main drivers of value for these vendors, rather than quality (and modern) engineering.
throwaway5959 2y ago
I’m sure it worked out well for the pocketbooks of the new management.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
some_guy_in_ca 2y ago
I've spent my entire 30 career in ERP Consulting (PeopleSoft), working with Payroll, Accounting, and Student management systems. I have a current client that is a mirror of this exactly. They had one new executive go to a sales demo, and the sales guy told him it would be "live" in a few months, and he believed it. It was so laughable and downright embarrassing for the client. In this case, I know it is at least a 3-year project if you have competent team members and vendors. It also depends on how you define "success" and how many business processes you are willing to break. However, these can stretch into 5 year projects when you are working with mission critical systems running accounting and payroll. In those cases, you cannot move fast and break things. Most organizations don't have competent teams, and the vendors are often made up of low-skilled offshore workers, which makes nuanced, complex projects very complicated. The sales side will promise the world then the implementation team is low skilled and underdelivers. I have seen this with several other clients, replacing pieces of PeopleSoft modules with different applications. Sometimes they come back and sometimes they just suffer through it and then find a third option after the new system fails to deliver. Most ERP systems are just CRUD systems. So, you end up with a working CRUD system being replaced by a new CRUD system. The old system had its strengths and weaknesses. The new system will solve some problems and break others. You spend 3-5 years replacing a system only to end up in the same place you were before: A CRUD system. This is maddening unless you are the new vendor and getting enriched.
kgeist 2y ago
Wow, we had the exact same situation. We had a 15 year old CRM/ERP developed in-house, full of very specific and complex business processes/rules/entities tailored to how our business works. At some point, someone decided to migrate to Dynamics CRM. As it wasn't realistic to migrate immediately, they chose to do it incrementally: the both CRMs would be active at the same time, and there would be lots of data synchronizations between them, and our managers/the system's users would learn how to use Dynamics CRM in the meantime. The project was scrapped after 1 year because they realized that fully migrating it would took many years, and the managers didn't like the new CRM because it was lacking functionality (didn't match the existing workflows), and overall the whole synchronization stuff was pretty fragile and full of bugs. Now we've chosen the path of improving dev practices in the existing CRM to impove its reliability instead of hoping that somehow magically a new CRM would solve all our problems without any effort.
isakkeyten 2y ago
I've been on the other side of this. Big company was under the impression they could ultimately save money by switching from an enterprise ERP solution that costed them hundres of thousands of dollars in licences with an inhouse one. The only problem was the ERP was carrying 90% of the company on it's shoulders and this would've been a horribly large task. I worked on it for 2 years with incompentent managers and slow progress. After I left the company they continued for another 2 and then quit that endevour. Wasting a shitload of money (think 10 devs + managers for 4 years...).

thih9 2y ago

What happened to the CFO?

datavirtue 2y ago
Hmmm, maybe check his LinkedIn where he brags about the successful transition and ERP migration he led at that company.
- permalac 2y ago
  That happened in my company. The CIO left bragging about implementing itil on servicenow. What they did was replacing RT for servicenow, and only for some ticketing queues. Nothing else, no change management, no cmdb, only an incident and non standard requests queues. 128k/ year, while RT still runs in a VM for all the other ticketing queues. Lots of powerpoints.
frontalier 2y ago
probably got hired by the vendor

89vision 2y ago

> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot because they're too good at selling their own innocence.
- talldatethrow 2y ago
  I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to features. Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time. Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea so good it had REAL PMF, and made that. But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Amazing story. Love your honesty. Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?
    - talldatethrow 2y ago
      It really wouldn't solve the main problem which is that the product itself isn't really needed or that great, code quality aside.

notatoad 2y ago

>The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.

ZiiS 2y ago
Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and especially especially if it is being done by the most expensive contractors.
- notatoad 2y ago
  yes, the key is to always have some sort of migration happening so every problem can be addressed by saying "this will be resolved after the new ERP is rolled out"
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    And you can decline to do literally any piece of work because you need to focus on the migration. Perfect scheme.
    - 8b16380d 2y ago
      Or “it’s best to wait till the migration complete before our team needs to do anything”
- highwaylights 2y ago
  The latter half of your sentence suggests this project may actually have been a roaring success (for the vendor).
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Depends on the vendor's goals. If it's to fatten and butcher a pig, and never see any future work from them, sure. If the vendor is hoping to have a sustained profitable relationship then not so much.

blantonl 2y ago

Consulting: If you're not part of the solution, be part of the problem.

ethbr1 2y ago
Or to put it in other terms, the boxer who throws the fight also gets paid very well.

rm445 2y ago

That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.

calvinmorrison 2y ago
I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
- enraged_camel 2y ago
  I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When people migrate from one system to another, they try to make the new system work exactly the way the original system does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than half the cost (and time span) of the migration.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    "We hate everything about our system, get us a new one" "We want the new system to work exactly like our old one" It's probably not worth the money...
    - drekipus 2y ago
      I haven't pieced those together but of course they go hand in hand. I had one guy want me to recreate Microsoft word, worts and all, because his current Word wasn't doing it for him

TecoAndJix 2y ago

Hershey? https://pemeco.com/a-case-study-on-hersheys-erp-implementation-failure-the-importance-of-testing-and-scheduling/ https://pemeco.com/a-case-study-on-hersheys-erp-implementati...

client4 2y ago
The nice thing about consulting at Hershey is that they have candy closets where you can grab what you like, it occasionally includes new demo candy. And the whole town smells like chocolate.

mixedCase 2y ago

Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.

jmole 2y ago
No one gets credit for "I told you so" - look at it this way, you didn't have the skill at the time to make the company listen to you.
- joshuahutt 2y ago
  How could you, in such a case?
  - jmole 2y ago
    I don't know, and maybe there was no solution. Just offering a different perspective.
    - joshuahutt 2y ago
      Some things seem inevitable. I've really run myself through the wringer trying to figure out "what could I have done to achieve a better outcome for everyone involved." I guess success and failure are both group efforts.
  - elwell 2y ago
    short the stock
  - nilamo 2y ago
    They ignored the CTO on an issue that was 100% tech based. There was no winning, the board decided to ignore the person they hired to make that sort of decision for them.
nick7376182 2y ago
Better to write "managed critical scoping phase of $xx migration". Not your fault the company priorities later changed and it wasn't completed!

anonymouse008 2y ago

Change this from ERP to POS and you've scripted 9/10ths of the pains for many quick service restaurant chains. Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!? They still can't get out of the wet paper bag, because otherwise "we'll someone might start selling candy or something unapproved" > we'll isn't that's what your franchise liaisons and agreements are for?! I'm just beside myself. I'm so hyped on this because this one 'immovable problem' prevents me from having API access to my locations accounts. Everything just hurts. /rant

bombcar 2y ago
I swear the only way to get an ERP or POS change to work is to start a competitor using the new solution and wait for them to acquire you. And then live forever with two systems running side by side.
canadianfella 2y ago
[dead]
invalidlogin 2y ago
Would you mind breaking down the situation in a little more detail? Not my field and I find your story interesting.
- cutemonster 2y ago
  I also don't totally understand, what's a TIN for example (Taxpayer Identification Number?) and why is it making money? (Don't taxes go to the state?)
  - curious_curios 2y ago
    Yeah, it’s the identifier the government uses to attribute income for, and hence calculate the resulting taxes. In this case it sounds like a midsize business is using some random guy’s number, so the tax authorities are under the impression there’s a guy pulling in millions personally, and a company with no income. Given that individuals and companies get taxed differently in many different jurisdictions concurrently this will be a mess to untangle.

justinclift 2y ago

Was SAP or IBM the external vendor? :)

thefourthchime 2y ago

Story as old as time. It's a second system, they rarely work. The only hope is to come up with something small and exciting the a new generation moves too. Then you can build it to become the new thing. Trying to build a total second system is nearly impossible if it's big and old.

callwhendone 2y ago

>I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I despise working in corporate america.

lostlogin 2y ago
> I despise working in corporate america. America might lead the way, but corporate anything, anywhere is pretty terrible.

dxxth 2y ago

I bet it was Oracle, SAP, or IBM. The hydraheaded horror of enterprise bloated licenses. I feel this on a deep level since the ERP system at our company is in the middle of moving to one of these big vendors and so much is simply not working out, extending timelines and development cycles. Cost only goes up and ROI is pushed out beyond the horizon. PLM is equally bad and a horror show of legacy vendors trying to sell their solutions with the promise of customizability. Again the small, more modern players in the PLM space are constantly ignored for the big legacy ones and it turns out those legacy platforms even in their latest iterations are inflexible at best or downright hellish at worst. The reason behind all of this? Service contracts and vendor lock-in are the main drivers of value for these vendors, rather than quality (and modern) engineering.

throwaway5959 2y ago

I’m sure it worked out well for the pocketbooks of the new management.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

some_guy_in_ca 2y ago

I've spent my entire 30 career in ERP Consulting (PeopleSoft), working with Payroll, Accounting, and Student management systems. I have a current client that is a mirror of this exactly. They had one new executive go to a sales demo, and the sales guy told him it would be "live" in a few months, and he believed it. It was so laughable and downright embarrassing for the client. In this case, I know it is at least a 3-year project if you have competent team members and vendors. It also depends on how you define "success" and how many business processes you are willing to break. However, these can stretch into 5 year projects when you are working with mission critical systems running accounting and payroll. In those cases, you cannot move fast and break things. Most organizations don't have competent teams, and the vendors are often made up of low-skilled offshore workers, which makes nuanced, complex projects very complicated. The sales side will promise the world then the implementation team is low skilled and underdelivers. I have seen this with several other clients, replacing pieces of PeopleSoft modules with different applications. Sometimes they come back and sometimes they just suffer through it and then find a third option after the new system fails to deliver. Most ERP systems are just CRUD systems. So, you end up with a working CRUD system being replaced by a new CRUD system. The old system had its strengths and weaknesses. The new system will solve some problems and break others. You spend 3-5 years replacing a system only to end up in the same place you were before: A CRUD system. This is maddening unless you are the new vendor and getting enriched.

kgeist 2y ago

Wow, we had the exact same situation. We had a 15 year old CRM/ERP developed in-house, full of very specific and complex business processes/rules/entities tailored to how our business works. At some point, someone decided to migrate to Dynamics CRM. As it wasn't realistic to migrate immediately, they chose to do it incrementally: the both CRMs would be active at the same time, and there would be lots of data synchronizations between them, and our managers/the system's users would learn how to use Dynamics CRM in the meantime. The project was scrapped after 1 year because they realized that fully migrating it would took many years, and the managers didn't like the new CRM because it was lacking functionality (didn't match the existing workflows), and overall the whole synchronization stuff was pretty fragile and full of bugs. Now we've chosen the path of improving dev practices in the existing CRM to impove its reliability instead of hoping that somehow magically a new CRM would solve all our problems without any effort.

isakkeyten 2y ago

I've been on the other side of this. Big company was under the impression they could ultimately save money by switching from an enterprise ERP solution that costed them hundres of thousands of dollars in licences with an inhouse one. The only problem was the ERP was carrying 90% of the company on it's shoulders and this would've been a horribly large task. I worked on it for 2 years with incompentent managers and slow progress. After I left the company they continued for another 2 and then quit that endevour. Wasting a shitload of money (think 10 devs + managers for 4 years...).