OneWorld and World Coexisting Problems

[RLessor]

Pizzagalli started implementing OneWorld Xe over one year ago in a coexisting environment using PeopleSoft consultants. Our plans were reviewed and approved by PeopleSoft (then JDE) so as to complete the transition to OneWorld Xe by the February 28, 2005 date. Our company went live with one product, Accounts Payable, in September after nearly one year of starting the project with several modules remaining to implement. Constant installation issues kept coming back to haunt our company as we attempted to move forward. Unfortunately the implementation has not gone very well and we have decided to scrap the move to OneWorld.

Our implementation was to be completely web enabled using the collaborative portal with only IT staff having fat clients. We have constantly battled web application issues requiring package builds and considerable downtime. With World moving forward and now being web enabled, our company is looking at this as being our next logical step. Basically our company felt the OneWorld product was very complex and not as reliable as the World Software (a user since 1988).

Have any of the forum members backed off OneWorld and returned to World A7.3.15? Any suggestions? After spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars towards the move to OneWorld, we now must look at the PeopleSoft solution in general (more so with Oracle in the picture once again). Your comments are greatly appreciated.

Randy K. Lessor
Manager of Information Technology
World Software/OneWorld Xe Coexistence
OneWorld SP23
Enterprise Server – iSeries/400 (V5R3)
Application Server – Windows 2000 Web Server

 

[mike_twg]

Bottom Line, you need the people who have the real hands on experience to
accomplish the task at hand.
Your description of events for your implementation reminds me of ours.
When we acquired the in-house talent ( Two Good Developers with
experience and One Good Application Person for configuring the software
again with real experience ) things went forward.
We were able to get the warehouse replenishment portion to work smoothly
to accommodate for next day delivery for multiple companies with-in the same
warehouse, combined with product delivery for multiple companies on the same
truck. Routed !!!

To sum it up, you need the expertise in house to accomplish the job, get
rid of the consultants and fire qualified experienced people.

 

[slandess]

get

Mike -
Didn't you mean _hire_ (not fire) qualified experienced people in your statement above?

You are also implying that all consultants are bad. I highly resent this statement.
I have been working as an AS/400-iSeries-i5 consultant on mostly JDE software
for the last 15 years, and have never gotten a bad reference from any client.

You remind me of the police officers with whom I attended college in Dallas - In an economics class taught by an adjunct instructor who was an attorney, we spent more time arguing over whether all lawyers are crooks than learning economics.

Regards,
Steve

 

[mike_twg]

Steve,

I reviewed the email from RLessor and my reply based on that email. I
pasted both just below your reply.

I took a step back and tried to look thru my response from your point of
view.

I now see where you are coming from, and want to clarify my response.

RLessor has just gone through a very tough implementation experience, and
made specific reference to the large dollar expense used.

My response was intended to encourage RLessor to take a step back and
re-group.
My intent was to suggest to RLessor to hire in house staff for this,
which would lesson the expense of going through another implementation.

In no way was I trying to give consultants a bad rap.

I have had the pleasure to work with many consultants, and gladly refer
business to them all the time.
In fact I can reference a couple of GREAT consultants who can help
RLessor succeed the second time around.

I hope this email clears up any misunderstandings others may have had
with my earlier response to RLessor, as Steve Landess had.

 

[JDEPrincess]

Re: RE: OneWorld and World Coexisting Problems

I think you could help Randy out by sending him a case of wine!

...or the Princess

...or Steve as an apology

 

[RLessor]

Re: RE: OneWorld and World Coexisting Problems

The wine sounds like a starting point to forget the past several months!

 

[ajit_nadgouda]

Well. I dont think OneWord so bad that the implementation should fail. This is typical problem when you go online only on one module. There are many problems of integrity. When the things start degenerating, the blame keeps shifting from area to area. There could be many cases of unnecessary customisations of interfaces, because all the modules are not online. This causes bottlenecks. This could be the starting point of troubles, followed by frequent downtime for web servers due to constant technical development.

This might happen when a technical person aggressively drives the project keeping aside the ultimate user and without a strong functional guy. This results in frequent disruptions, with both parties blaming each other. I suggest you can still try by introducing a functional guy who understands the problems faced by enduser instead of hiring a tech quy who will blame the enduser.

I might be wrong as I may not know the full details of the case.

Regards,
Ajit

 

[GMunchel]

We are somewhat in the same boat. Our major location in upstate New York is all World, our Canadian facility (running in another environment off the Ithaca box) is also World. These are running okay and the Canadian implementation was done without any consulting help. A Korean facility has implemented in One World (yep...Environment #3) and our Mexican facility (Environment #4) is coming up; these implementations have been plagued with many technical issues, slow speeds across the WAN, and have required consulting help to set up and apply service packs & updates. All these different environment are on one AS/400.

Dilemma for us is that keeping the One World implementations moving forward requires more time, more consulting, more hassles, slower transaction entry, WAN speed issues and ultimately more expense than the World side. We too are considering stopping One World development and reverting all locations to World. Some of us think this will be easier and less expensive to maintain and that the World product with its Cum 15 web face is once again being supported, marketed and enhanced. Some of us think (hope) that maybe the World product will be decoupled from Peoplesoft/Oracle and be bought by someone truly committed to it. I have heard that some companies have dropped installed One World implementations (one I heard about involved 3000 users) and gone back to World, but I do not know this first hand.

IMHO, being a financial applications support guy with lots of experience in World and some in One World, I like World's speed, reliability, ease & speed of maintenance and ability of our limited technical staff to debug and find problems when they occur. Unless there are strong business reasons requiring functionality that exists only in One World and those reasons support the expenditure of the thousands of $$$ it costs to go to and stay on One World, then go back to World A/P and keep your enterprise on World. Note that the foregoing is my personal opinion only.