Acronyms

June, 2016

The customer’s project manager of an ERP implementation is usually a central figure in the organisation.

If not, then the project is pretty much doomed.

In some ERP implementations you’ll find that this figure is the logistics manager, in some it is the financial manager which in many aspects is great because he is probably the most intelligent person in the organisation as well.

In others it might be the IT manager who is also quite a savvy geek and holds a lot of information and a profound understanding of the business.

The project manager needs to be knowledgeable in various areas of the business, he needs to have good common sense and most importantly, be practical.

The problem is that practical, pragmatic and straight forward IT managers are mythical creatures much like Santa Claus and fairies.

IT managers have a tendency to over complicate things, they will try to automate, schedule, synchronise and virtualise every bit of information.

It is a strange type of creature, the IT manager, it is using acronyms for every single thing, even when they go to the loo they’ll say I’m AFK rather than admit that they are having a piss.

Sometimes you can sit in a meeting for a whole hour and listen to nothing but acronyms being thrown back and forth. The KPI of the ERP is in the EIS, BI, and OLAP. The MRP and the APS are used daily.

I was sitting once in a meeting with an IT manager and a colleague. The two started talking in Acronymish and I started to lose my patience with them.

At some point I told them that if they don’t stop the acronym in the conversation then I’m going to give them a wedgie with their ties. They asked me what a wedgie is.

I would have thought that given the fact that they are both gits and have been all their lives, someone at school must have explained this by demonstration to them by now.

Once I went to a factory and the IT manager wanted to create a special report for replenishing slow moving rare and expensive items that they hold for very specific jobs.

He started describing to me what he wants, adding flags and designing a complex report that MRP will spit out at the end of the run.

“John” I said,

“Where do you sit?”

“I sit there by the window”

“And where do you hold the stock of these items?”

“Over there, on the shelf”

“Get up John, what do you see?”

“I see the shelf with all these products”

“This is your MRP report”

One of the things that puzzles me is how IT managers decide their security policy. It is understandable that firms who manufacture for the MOD will be secured with strict rules but sometimes you see the most ridiculously protected organisations.

Factories which manufacture plastic widgets would have a VPN connection and the password is W6@1sS%^£gtPLdZ|fg$*dlOp{+es,m>eFGTE or worse, while others are much more sensible and laid back.

This all comes down to how sensible is the IT manager and how good he is in scaring his bosses to spend money on security whether necessary or not.

However, ERP consultants can also be a pain. More than often, you will find that they too are technical gits that can talk for England without actually saying anything useful. This reminds me the story about the consultant and the shepherd but a good consultant is priceless, bringing on board ideas and implementing business processes based on his experience from other businesses.

My dear friend JB once asked me to change something on the system.

Being a good consultant I then started explaining why it is in fact an illogical request businesswise.

I went on and praised the qualities of the current process. I elaborated on the functionality behind the scene and finished by explaining that it is technically impossible.

JB kept very quiet and listened to me until I finished, then said.

“Now, I know you, just get on with it and do it!!”

So… I did.

And this reminds of the story about the dog that got lost in the woods.

At the end of the day, we are all people. There are some really amazing people and ideas out there and you need to find the ones that you identify with and bond well with.

The relationship between the project manager and the consultant is imperative for the success of a good ERP implementation.

Medatech’s chairman once said that during the seventies the buzz word was mass production.

In the eighties the buzz word was JIT.

In the nineties it was B2B.

In the new millennium it is: “fun to do business with”.

Written by Adar Hamm

Operations Manager

Medatech UK