ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) - Part One
I finally had some time today to get the first part of this article completed and I decided to post it as a sneak preview. I will expand on this topic and am planning to add a lot more information later.
1) What is ERP?
ERP stands for "Enterprise Resource Planning". ERP is a software product that is capable of running and integrating multiple different organizational functions such as accounting/financials, human resources and payroll in a shared database. Without going much into detail on what this means, let me jump right into a real life example. I'm assuming that you know a little about the employment process, perhaps from your work experience.
Let's say you are applying for a job. The process is pretty straightforward nowadays - you find a good position worth applying for either online or through other resources such as recruitment agencies, then submit your resume and wait for a call or email follow-up. After a while you get screened and interviewed by a company that is interested in your skills. Then, if you are the right candidate, you get hired.
Continue reading 'ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) - Part One'
Why ADP PayForce sucks – again!
I received a lot of emails from other companies thinking about PayForce after I wrote this humble opinion. Since questions were mostly around specific issues, I decided to elaborate more on this topic and provide some facts. So, here is what I came up with...
ADP Payforce data extraction to SAP
I finally completed all the custom SQL queries to extract data out of ADP Payforce to SAP HCM/Payroll. Historic data was impossible to pull because ADP doesn't have a "from" and "to" range for an action (it's based on "effective date" and "effective sequence"). So, you would either corrupt your historic data by modifying the dates or just load the most current record. I chose the latter.
The whole process was very painful and I had to built a lot of lookup tables to accomodate SAP infotypes. Apparently we are the first company to convert from ADP PayForce to SAP, so there was no help available from anyone. The queries were tested for two properties and they seemed to work, but the real test is coming up this Friday when I extract all employees througho ut the company. The biggest pain was extracting the YTD data out of ADP. It's so different in both systems that I had to write some UNION ALL queries to combine multiple data sets. I strongly suggest to convert in the beginning of the year. Quarter-end conversions are possible, but extracting the YTD details is extremely difficult. Unfortunately, we do not have a choice and have to migrate at the end of this quarter...our implementation partner wasn't ready on Jan 1st.
ADP PayForce to SAP migration
During the last three weeks I have been working on migrating ADP PayForce database to SAP HCM.
Here are some notes:
- Data migration will be easier if you re-create the ADP DB structure for the required tables on your own SQL server. Extracting from ADP can be done through Crystal and you don't want to write and test your queries on extremely slow web-based Crystal. Instead of going through all SAP infotypes and re-creating the whole table structure, go through each infotype separately and create tables as needed.
- SAP requires "From" and "To" range of dates for any master data import. ADP only has an "Effective Date", which means you will not be able to import employee history. You can only get the current data, for which you can specify "12-31-9999" (infinity) as the "To" date. I already thought of many different case scenarios and I ended up concluding that the historic data import is simply impossible, especially with the fact that ADP can have multiple entries on a single day with a logical "Effective Sequence".
- Clean up your data in ADP before importing it into SAP. This is self-explanatory. SAP simply won't accept bad data and you will have to go back and forth, fixing data in ADP first and then re-extracting table data. One-time data change before import into SAP won't work...most probably you will have to run multiple queries against the same data at different points of time (say to upload "Initial Conversion" and then final master data). Also, this is your best time and chance to term all inactive "shadow" employees that have been sitting in PayForce.
- There will be lots of data fields which SAP requires that doesn't exist in ADP; and ADP will have lots of data that SAP doesn't. Cover requirements first, then move on to optional "nice to have" data.
- Do not allow your implementation team to run dual-entries between master data uploads. Master data upload has to happen once, period. Dual entry or entry-tracking will bring a lot of potential issues, especially if your master data gets changed a lot. Provide test data to your development team early, let them test everything on a development server. Once everyone is satisfied with the results, provide a cut-over date after which no data is modified in ADP. That will be your day of re-extraction of all data from ADP.
- Change ADP accounts to read-only so that data is not modified after the extraction process.
I'm sure there is a lot more to this than the above - I will keep updating this page as we go through this painful process.
ADP PayForce is EVIL!
You can hear "PayForce is Evil" and "PayForce is the Devil" from everyone who works with ADP at my work. Seriously, how could ADP create such a crappy product? And they are telling us PayForce will be the future? What kind of future is that? I guess it's a rhetoric question...
I can't believe our company fell for ADP's sales pitch when they pushed PayForce to us four years ago. Back then we were on Ceredian, running payroll by ourselves and distributing checks. Running payroll was somewhat tough and we thought ADP was the solution. Well, we thought wrong.
From continuous downtime issues and buggy upgrades to unacceptable errors and database inconsistencies, we are still in the process of recovering and fixing all employee master data. And we have been doing it for four years now! Can you imagine the frustration level we have throughout the organization? Do you know how much money and energy has been lost trying to get this piece of crap product to work?
Truly, ADP PayForce is a work of art. A wrong kind of art, evil kind of art. The interesting thing is, I tried to Google for PayForce reviews and couldn't find any (from customers that have been using this product). Isn't there anybody else out there that wants to share their love with ADP? Please leave your feedback below :)
One month away from going live with SAP
Sorry for not being able to post anything lately. I've been so swamped at work that I haven't had any time to work on my website.
I'm not expecting it to get better, considering that we are going live with SAP in a month and going into another phase right after that...so I will be away for a while, probably until the end of the year.
ComputerWorld article on my project
Check out this article. It talks about SAP and its Duet software and how the company I work for is planning to implement it. We have also been featured on Yahoo News and SAP's websites.
The project kick-off date is scheduled for March 19th. Work, work and more work!
SAP vs Oracle?
I'm wondering who is going to win the battle. I've always been a fan of SAP and looking at the SAP/Oracle war I'm starting to wonder what will eventually happen between the two giants. Oracle has been buying companies like crazy - PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel are all under Oracle's wings. Oracle is coming up with so called "Fusion" that will eliminate these different companies and their products and merge the technology into one plaform by 2008-2009 (yeah right).
My 2 cents on this:
- It will take many years for Oracle to be able to merge everything into one finished product. To be able to accomplish something like that, they would need full support from all child companies, including those that were the victims of hostile takeovers.
- Taking completely different pieces of software, written in different languages/styles and merging them together has always been ugly, no matter what the experts say.
- Oracle simply does not have the manpower to complete Fusion in a couple of years.
- Oracle is killing healthy competition by buying small ERP vendors.
- How the heck are they planning to convert all PeopleSoft, JDE and Siebel users to Fusion? They are probably going to make them buy Fusion :)
- Oracle ERP sucks compared to MySAP 2005 (it's a fact). It will take years for Oracle to develop something that works as beautifully as MySAP 2005 does.
- SAP should stop selling Oracle DB and move towards IBM DB2 for large enterprises and MSSQL 2005 for small to medium-size businesses. I don't think developing a solid DB system is worth the effort for SAP at this point.
