hundreds of people involved with a failed SAP upgrade
10 years in the making
failed go-lives
in other companies leadership would be fired for not getting this right
this company knows nothing about technology and nothing about business transformation
100s of millions of dollars going to a bunch of glorified VP project managers and Accenture and what do we have to show for it?
now the CFO who is an ex- investment banker and his ex-mckinsey VP are going to try and save the day and make this ERP operational. yah, like that's going to make this thing work.
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Not sure if people understand. We are just moving to a newer implementation of SAP which needs to be leaner (yeah you can't hold the data .. you need to start archiving and purging data because it is in memory DB running alreay hot... mind you, it doesn't hold NA Wholesale stage 2 transactional data yet..). The life is short.. SAP is now pushing RISE already. The mainstream maintenance will end in 2040 and that means we will be already in outdated tech when we go live with all geos..
@3ere the name of the program started as "SAP upgrade." If you know, you know.
Pretty sure most of the people posting here are clueless on what is being IMPLEMENTED. It is NOT an upgrade. With this, I have come to the conclusion the comments are pretty out of touch and ignorant.
It is funny to think we were ready. Could the infrastructure survive with what was about to come? The Nike teams are now frantically spending their time reducing data footprint of the current Fashion system so that they can manage the loads...understand this is an in memory system but there seems to so much push to for purging data to extend the life of the current system...
Just FYI.. The Accenture team is clueless on the engineering side and often needs the other Nike talent to guide and dictate their implementation strategies.
What’s your status?
Red.
I’m red too.
Also red.
I’m reddish-orange.
Very red.
Ok, so are we going to launch on time?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
SEC was NOT ready. Does 24GB ring any bells?
First of all Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro could not even do this work. They can barely manage Production Support. They rely on the SEC team to answer any questions that isn’t on a paper in front of them. Second, SEC was ready, the NA business wasn’t. Third, Accenture does bring valuable tools and the resources I work with aren’t being trained. Fourth, unless you are on the project and understand what’s going on you have no right to criticize. The project team works harder than they ever have at Nike.
SAP upgrade failed every single step along the way. Every single one. MVP approach? D-mb. Design for the enterprise, implement for the geography. Approach taken means massive rewrite in each implementation. Wrong people were on this from the beginning, wasn’t people that knew and understood things, and almost every decision made in the early design workshops (to address things done horribly wrong the first time around), were walked back to doing it the (wrong) way it was done before. Configure packaged applications correctly, and they will talk to each other fairly easily, do everything custom (for no reason) and the integration is exponentially more complicated…. And, that complexity rolls downhill, creating more and more customizations the further you get from the original stupid decision to do something custom that isn’t needed. This SAP upgrade should be halted. Until the approach is making the business more functional and profitable versus just slamming in a new tool. Tech is in a spin cycle - move everybody to a new tool, then when the eval/lowball cost period is over and the vendor wants to get paid, then we say it’s too expensive and have to move to another tool … and each time we do, we do bare minimum, and lose functionality. Do that for a lot of years combined with constant reorgs … and that’s why it’s such a mess, every project runs way over budget, and business functions and processes continue to degrade. Do better.
Missing the 2 most important management tenets:
- Trust your people to make the right decisions
- Tell them what needs to be done, not how to do it.
Should be the intro slide for every new (and existing) S/LT
The Nike talent has the knowledge to run the implementation. They could ideally get this without paying big bucks to Accenture or Deloitte. We already had consultants on the ground running the current SAP systems.. not sure, why we continue to invest in Accenture folks.
We could ideally get additional task doers from Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro or other providers and run this show. Maybe after the NA go live they should gut the Accenture team. Not sure, why they still are involved in other Geo go live..
management consulting doing what they do best: ruin companies
And the beauty is that most Accenture consultants are learning SAP being on the project and Nike is paying then top dollars for doing that, instead of leveraging deep institutional knowledge of Nike employees they are laid off. No impact to any of the VPs but low level employees were laid off.
Follow the $. Who was responsible for messing up the budget? Projects go through phases, phases are funded - how did it get get so far down the road with obvious disconnects between reality, the budget, and the timeline? Almost anyone could see it was disaster coming. Not going live was the smart decision. Failure was 3-6-9 months prior when every milestone was missed.