Yes, we had a 22 man team and 15 overseas and I was the principal architect for this product. It took 3 years. 15,000 users. This wasn't a clown outfit. I think there was about 3.5TiB of data online which was a big deal back then.
Writing software on that scale is crazy. No wonder you had problems. Hell, mature products have bugs. I can't imagine that would have been usable for years. Maybe I exaggerate a bit, but man, there's a lot of corner cases that are going to come out of the woodwork.
If you take a COTS ERP and try and customise it, you're not pulling in a host of industry best practices, you're pulling one opinion in that doesn't match your own business processes.
Here’s the thing, no ERP vendor develops their product in a vacuum. Every business develops its processes that way though.
I know I’m generalising, but pretty much all the time the business benefits by doing a smarter process assisted by the software. Larger companies require more rigid processes. Choosing software of the wrong scale is going to be painful. I’m looking at you SAP. But only empire-building wankers select software that’s a bad overall fit. When you do your investigation with an open mind you will find a suitable candidate.
The cost is either you change your business processes to match the incumbent process which is met with resistance or bend the product the other way. Neither really fit the real world.
And writing a whole system is better? What was the budget? And what compromises did you have to make?
You simply can’t please all the users all the time. Further, what the user wants and does is only useful if it fits the big picture. Jo the sales lady wants to have all of her stuff in stock all the time. She needs it. Because she neither knows nor cares about the cost of inventory. She cares about commission. Just saying.
My point is, don't customise it. Your business process isn't awesome or special, it's just an abortion that evolved for years as the company grew and works 95% of the time. Maybe less. The company is always wrong. The software isn't necessarily ideal but it's almost always better, if different from, your current process. Middle managers should have their bonuses clipped in proportion to the changes they ‘need.’
If you haven't got that attitude Oracle really wants a chat with you. You can have an afternoon on Larry's boat.
I think there are too many management process types out there who will sell an ideology rather than try and understand the business. Six Sigma comes to mind.
Fuck the ideology! Although some of the manufacturing theory is interesting. I think there are too many people emotionally attached to broken processes and romantic ideals. In this part of the world you can’t even find a purchasing manager who’s authorised to buy things, let alone comprehend any kind of forecasting theory.
Automate. Install software. Do more with less people. Looked at any economics theory lately?
I've seen more small businesses derive value from a small custom solution built in house than I have elsewhere.
The most value I’ve seen is stock write-downs, and transfer loading done in excel.
I’ve only seen one small company with custom software outside of macros. A mechanic wrote some mortgage broking software in dbase. I was not impressed. But they had a high margin product and it did work until you touched it.
The current state of things and the audit requirements are not congruent. The business lives now which is the 99% use case and the audit trail lives in the past. The two can be separated very easily.
From a management perspective. SOX compliance much? But I was thinking of bigger companies when I wrote that.
As for audit, Lightswitch has process structure and auditing built in if you want to go down that route.
Transactions, mate. They’re there for a reason.
As for the software guy and the operations guy. Note the focus on Office 365. Someone else should be doing your operations in 2016 if you're a small business.
Very much so!
A software guy can quite happily change a toner cartridge, phone up the broadband supplier if something goes pop or reinstall a windows machine. The rest of their time is spent on business automation which is an efficiency step.
The user can sort out the printer as well as the software guy. in 2016 why the fuck is toner still an IT issue? They manage OK at home don’t they?
The biggest productivity killer in software development is interruptions. I’m telling you, the guy will leave if you don’t let him get on with the software. If you want incremental improvement go and talk to the management accountant, who spends his day with his finger up his arse, and get him to write you a macro. As soon as you get the programmer dicking around with infrastructure you’ve wasted him.