5 ms·

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

by rm445 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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
      - nilamo 2y ago
        Or refusing to use anything except Office 2003 because newer versions are too different...
  - gentschev 2y ago
    There's also the related failure mode of deciding you're going to fix all your other system problems as part of the migration, bloating the scope and creating too much complexity. Just do the necessary stuff, migrate, and then go back and fix the nice to haves.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake of it. Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible. You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just in IT but also to hire new people or replace retiring ones. Only Bob knew this process. What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.
    - wakeforce 3y ago
      I work specifically with small and medium businesses too, and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot of other people in that space.
      - calvinmorrison 3y ago
        Its nice. It's certainly not high faluting as a lot of HN jobs but I make good money for where I live, our clients are mostly regional but a lot of the 50 states have customers over the years. Mostly we work on implementing and servicing ERP systems. Our differentiator is our skillet in integrations and holistic problem solving. Since the ERP sits in the middle of almost every IT venn diagram, we run into new tech on a weekly basis. Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
- epolanski 3y ago
  I feel the same above technology in general. E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I've noticed that the same applies to any large inflexible platform, such as the public clouds. If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers. If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time. I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everything is more difficult, slower, and just all-round bad. But they "had" to do it. (Narrator: No, they didn't.)
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    I usually ask, is it a differentiator for our business to run X?
  - thayne 3y ago
    The problem is it is often very expensive to adapt other components to fit the inflexible platform. In your example, the customer may have had software that depended on the routers having some functionality that the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost of changing all their other systems to work around the limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen situations play out like that a few times.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      That kind of logic seems to make sense at first, but just confirms my point: trying to change IPv4 to suit you is a fools errand. Change what you do to hit ordinary bog-standard IPv4 instead and miraculously you’ll have fewer impediments.
      - jpc0 3y ago
        You clearly have no idea how complex routing is if that is your take on this.
        jiggawatts 3y ago
- primax 3y ago
  So, basically throw out everything that made them unique and differentiated, and do things like the Germans do.
  - whstl 3y ago
    Not quite. I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration. It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts. There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work (because change is often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture. If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software that integrates with it.
    - doctor_eval 2y ago
      Right. I’ve spent weeks creating automations in a business I knew very well, that would most likely save a few minutes per month for a low salary employee. But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project. The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people. Needless to say, it was a disaster.
      - whstl 2y ago
        That’s a great point. Very often the cost of automating something in those large systems is larger than the cost of a minimum wage person spending a couple hours a day clicking stuff…
- AllegedAlec 3y ago
  > 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. This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.
  - whstl 3y ago
    It's not really anyone saying "you're doing the task wrong", it's more like "you're doing it only so slightly differently that we need a few months to write customizations for it. We'll send you the bill". Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place, they can become one. End users involved in the integration don't really want to learn new processes or even do things slightly different, as they know that changing process often involves burning a lot of political capital and they often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are experts in finding a chance to perform those micro changes. It's a perfect marriage.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    A cope with what? Thats literally correct. The tool was made to replace 5 assistants, accountants and paper pushers. There's a design to this ginormous system that works best when you lean into it. Its why picking the right ERP is very iimportat
  - J_cst 2y ago
    I understand your point, but that's not how things work. If you source the right ERP you will be presented with procedures and processes that have been streamlined and optimized leveraging previous experiences of literally hundreds of businesses. Smaller and larger than yours. It's an error to dismiss the standard solution without deep consideration. Any process into a good ERP (e.g. managing a deposit payment, managing stock, documents transformation, uniqueness of product codes, and so on) is battle tested and may be ready to solve issues that at the moment your company in not seeing, but perhaps will have to face with the growth of the next five years and in five years perhaps you'll see the reasons why things were setup that way into the ERP. I have been happily humbled more than once by that. Check how things are supposed to work into your ERP, understand them and comply. That's how to have a functioning ERP in your company. Or just don't buy it and go for excel, it's cheaper (but just at the beginning, be warned).
- jajko 2y ago
  A wonderful statement straight out of ERP's sales guys (or other folks on the same side dependent on keeping the cash flowing). FYI what we trash here are typical SAP-level migrations and all horrible stories that always come with it, maybe your tiny company does things better but then its a different story in a different market. I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP are designed to work. This is their edge over competition, their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine, while selling various bullshit left and right, and constantly lying to given company how everything is fine and under control. Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always is. They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite). It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being told how rosy your future will be.
J_cst 2y ago
6 years ago I was called as a contractor by the company I work for as they were desperate that their ERP was just a money drain and despite the money was not functioning at all. Fast forward 6 years. I'm a manager at that company, responsible for business processes and it systems. The ERP works great, everybody's happy. Secret recipe: dismantle custom company processes. Culture change: realize that company's not that special and don't need special ERP recipes. Takeaway: if the ERP standard is set up in a certain way, probably there's a very good reason underneath that setup.

by rm445 3y ago

calvinmorrison 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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
    - nilamo 2y ago
      Or refusing to use anything except Office 2003 because newer versions are too different...
- gentschev 2y ago
  There's also the related failure mode of deciding you're going to fix all your other system problems as part of the migration, bloating the scope and creating too much complexity. Just do the necessary stuff, migrate, and then go back and fix the nice to haves.
swatcoder 3y ago
But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake of it. Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible. You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just in IT but also to hire new people or replace retiring ones. Only Bob knew this process. What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.
  - wakeforce 3y ago
    I work specifically with small and medium businesses too, and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot of other people in that space.
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      Its nice. It's certainly not high faluting as a lot of HN jobs but I make good money for where I live, our clients are mostly regional but a lot of the 50 states have customers over the years. Mostly we work on implementing and servicing ERP systems. Our differentiator is our skillet in integrations and holistic problem solving. Since the ERP sits in the middle of almost every IT venn diagram, we run into new tech on a weekly basis. Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
epolanski 3y ago
I feel the same above technology in general. E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
jiggawatts 3y ago
I've noticed that the same applies to any large inflexible platform, such as the public clouds. If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers. If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time. I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everything is more difficult, slower, and just all-round bad. But they "had" to do it. (Narrator: No, they didn't.)
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  I usually ask, is it a differentiator for our business to run X?
- thayne 3y ago
  The problem is it is often very expensive to adapt other components to fit the inflexible platform. In your example, the customer may have had software that depended on the routers having some functionality that the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost of changing all their other systems to work around the limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen situations play out like that a few times.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    That kind of logic seems to make sense at first, but just confirms my point: trying to change IPv4 to suit you is a fools errand. Change what you do to hit ordinary bog-standard IPv4 instead and miraculously you’ll have fewer impediments.
    - jpc0 3y ago
      You clearly have no idea how complex routing is if that is your take on this.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
primax 3y ago
So, basically throw out everything that made them unique and differentiated, and do things like the Germans do.
- whstl 3y ago
  Not quite. I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration. It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts. There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work (because change is often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture. If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software that integrates with it.
  - doctor_eval 2y ago
    Right. I’ve spent weeks creating automations in a business I knew very well, that would most likely save a few minutes per month for a low salary employee. But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project. The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people. Needless to say, it was a disaster.
    - whstl 2y ago
      That’s a great point. Very often the cost of automating something in those large systems is larger than the cost of a minimum wage person spending a couple hours a day clicking stuff…
AllegedAlec 3y ago
> 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. This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.
- whstl 3y ago
  It's not really anyone saying "you're doing the task wrong", it's more like "you're doing it only so slightly differently that we need a few months to write customizations for it. We'll send you the bill". Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place, they can become one. End users involved in the integration don't really want to learn new processes or even do things slightly different, as they know that changing process often involves burning a lot of political capital and they often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are experts in finding a chance to perform those micro changes. It's a perfect marriage.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  A cope with what? Thats literally correct. The tool was made to replace 5 assistants, accountants and paper pushers. There's a design to this ginormous system that works best when you lean into it. Its why picking the right ERP is very iimportat
- J_cst 2y ago
  I understand your point, but that's not how things work. If you source the right ERP you will be presented with procedures and processes that have been streamlined and optimized leveraging previous experiences of literally hundreds of businesses. Smaller and larger than yours. It's an error to dismiss the standard solution without deep consideration. Any process into a good ERP (e.g. managing a deposit payment, managing stock, documents transformation, uniqueness of product codes, and so on) is battle tested and may be ready to solve issues that at the moment your company in not seeing, but perhaps will have to face with the growth of the next five years and in five years perhaps you'll see the reasons why things were setup that way into the ERP. I have been happily humbled more than once by that. Check how things are supposed to work into your ERP, understand them and comply. That's how to have a functioning ERP in your company. Or just don't buy it and go for excel, it's cheaper (but just at the beginning, be warned).
jajko 2y ago
A wonderful statement straight out of ERP's sales guys (or other folks on the same side dependent on keeping the cash flowing). FYI what we trash here are typical SAP-level migrations and all horrible stories that always come with it, maybe your tiny company does things better but then its a different story in a different market. I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP are designed to work. This is their edge over competition, their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine, while selling various bullshit left and right, and constantly lying to given company how everything is fine and under control. Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always is. They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite). It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being told how rosy your future will be.

J_cst 2y ago

6 years ago I was called as a contractor by the company I work for as they were desperate that their ERP was just a money drain and despite the money was not functioning at all. Fast forward 6 years. I'm a manager at that company, responsible for business processes and it systems. The ERP works great, everybody's happy. Secret recipe: dismantle custom company processes. Culture change: realize that company's not that special and don't need special ERP recipes. Takeaway: if the ERP standard is set up in a certain way, probably there's a very good reason underneath that setup.