Officials in Somerset say that the first stage of a SAP
go-live for two councils, a police authority and a fire brigade has
had a "high degree of success", though an internal e-mail to staff
concedes that there are multiple problems.
The e-mail says that the SAP project team is working
"relentlessly day and night to fix all the issues raised via the
help desk, so that we can resume normal service as soon as
possible".
IBM has been working for more than a year on the
SAP implementation. The first phase went live on 1 April 2009
at Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council, and Avon
and Somerset Police, which are all members of
SouthWest One, a joint venture run by IBM. Devon and Somerset
Fire Brigade also went live.
The lead authority in SouthWest One, Somerset County Council,
told Computer Weekly, "The launch of the system impacts upon every
employee, covering everything from procurement activity to booking
annual leave... As with any large-scale implementation, there are
some teething difficulties to resolve for a small proportion of
users, and there are plenty of mechanisms in place for users to
report issues, with everyone up to the County Council's chief
executive taking a daily interest in getting the entire system in
place and on line as soon as possible."
The council added that "workarounds and contingency plans are
being effectively used to ensure business continuity and no adverse
impact to the public, or any of our range of service users".
Teething problems
Alan Jones, chief executive of Somerset County Council, has
apologised to staff affected by the problems. He said in an e-mail
to council staff on 7 April that the difficulties were
"teething".
He said, "The main engine of SAP is working - it has been
tested, and some staff have been able to process and create orders
on the system. However, some staff have not been able to do so for
a number of reasons. Please accept my apologies if you are one of
those affected."
Jones said that for some staff SAP has not yet gone live and is
not yet capable of offering full functionality. "Despite all the
detailed planning and preparation by our staff and those in South
West One, many of these glitches can only be ironed out -
frustrating though it is - during implementation. The set-up needs
to be absolutely right or SAP will not perform as well as we all
want it to in the longer term."
Technical issue being corrected
He said the single biggest issue was that, for some people, the
correct SAP attributes for an individual's role had not been
loaded. "This was a massive data load of over 30,000 records and
some have failed. This problem was most prevalent within the
Environment Directorate. We have had to reload this data and it
will take some time to correct the attributes for all 3,670 users.
We hope that the majority of these will be corrected in the next
few days and apologise for this delay."
The e-mail said that some staff were unable to raise
requisitions because they could not access e-catalogues. "This is a
technical issue that has been referred back to SAP and we await its
advice as to how to resolve this. In the meantime, we advise using
the catalogues wherever possible on the vendor's website and then
using free text orders as a temporary measure."
Somerset County Council said that when SAP is fully implemented,
it will "streamline and supersede many of the County Council's
existing systems and processes, in turn allowing greater levels of
efficiency and benefits to the public than ever before".
Additional links: