Three US companies that bought early versions of JD
Edwards' OneWorld enterprise resource planning (ERP) software have
submitted arbitration claims against the business applications
supplier, adding to the five cases that came to light last
year.The three additional users, who filed for
arbitration between November and this month, claimed that the
OneWorld suite has been so troublesome and bug-ridden that their
installations are in limbo.
The companies all said they have yet to decide
whether they will keep the JD Edwards applications or switch to
another supplier.
The new cases are similar to the five that
began going to arbitration last spring. One of the earlier filings
resulted in Texas-based Doskocil Manufacturing being awarded $2.3m
(£1.44m) in damages by an American Arbitration Association
panel.
JD Edwards, which contractually requires users
to seek arbitration when legal disputes arise, said it has settled
one of the earlier cases but would not disclose any details.
Whatever problems early adopters of OneWorld
may have faced, the software is now as stable as any other ERP
system on the market, said Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst at
Enterprise Applications Consulting.
But the fallout from early OneWorld rollouts
continues. Sprague Energy said in an arbitration document that it
suffered more than $10m (£6.28m) in damages because of problems
with OneWorld's stability and the cost and length of its
implementation.
Sprague began installing billing, finance and
other OneWorld applications in 2000 and then switched to JD
Edwards' web-based OneWorld XE software a year later. But after
working on the project for more than two years, Sprague was able to
bring OneWorld XE only partially online by the end of last year,
the company said in its filing.
Paul Scoff, vice president of law at Sprague,
declined to comment further on the problems the company
encountered. But he said the portions of the ERP system that
Sprague is using had to be heavily customised to make them
work.
The Flexitallic Group, a maker of industrial
gaskets in Houston, spent more than $3.7 m (£2.32m) on a OneWorld
project and was "almost brought to its knees because of promises
made and not kept" by JD Edwards, said chief executive officer Ray
LeSage.
According to arbitration documents in that
case, Flexitallic bought OneWorld in 1998 but found that the suite
"could not operate as a fully integrated system." This and other
problems prevented the company from rolling out the software across
its operations, the filing said.
Gerald Birin, president of Amherst
Technologies, said issues with a OneWorld system that was installed
in 1999 were forcing the IT products reseller to maintain a
separate system built around IBM's UniVerse database in addition to
the JDEdwards software. Amherst Technologies has to manually
consolidate its books between the two systems, according to
Birin.
A spokesman for JD Edwards would not comment
on the pending cases. But he said the company "stands by the
quality of its software and will vigorously defend any claims to
the contrary".