Rob's Blog

24/7: $4.5m Oracle ERP Project dumped for Legacy IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and IBM UniVerse Systems

My background since I qualified as a Chemical Engineer back in the days when a Commodore 64 had plenty of RAM has been bespoke software development for Engineering Contracting Companies - Oil & Gas and more recently Water.  Over the years, I have had a hand in the development of most of the modules required to operate these companies apart from the core Financials modules.  The emphasis of the systems has always been projects.  The company tenders for projects and takes responsibility for building a water treatment works or whatever - not just designing it.

Much of the software has been developed in a DBMS called IBM UniVerse - or at least IBM acquired the company that acquired the company that acquired the company that owned Prime Information.  It is a DBMS that supports multi-values fields and variable length fields rather like a Lotus Notes database.  It is clearly not a relational database although it can operate like one.  So it is great for ad hoc SQL type queries unlike Notes which is great if you've got a pre-built view.

In 1996 we introduced Lotus Notes into the mix and introduced additional features to the systems like workflow.  Lotus Notes/Domino and UniVerse work very well together partly because of the similarities in their architecture.

The systems could be operated with any Finance Systems that had open interfaces.  Between 1992 and 2008 the company used SUN Accounts licenced from a company called Systems Union.

As mentioned here and here, I was on the team that migrated to Oracle eBusiness Suite ERP away from SUN Finance and our in-house developed systems.

Well Oracle EBS suite was not a good fit for this company.  It ended up like a millstone around their neck and they have reluctantly taken the decision to go back to the legacy systems I wrote.  The $4.5m cost of the migration has been wasted.  I hope they learn from the experience but it was an expensive lesson.  I hate to say "I told you so" but it's in those blog posts.

So I start next week on the return journey.  What we could have achieved enhancing those systems with just 10% of that cost doesn't bear thinking about.  It is a crying shame.

I am trying to come up with a project name for the migration back into the "legacy" apps.  So far I've come up with Project Karma and Project Phoenix.  Any better suggestions?