Focus on business processes made DOT’s ERP a center of excellence
The graveyard of failed enterprise resource planning projects is littered with critical analyses by the Government Accountability Office and agencies’ inspectors general.
From the Veterans Affairs Department’s late, lamented Core Financial and Logistics System to the Interior Department’s bungled Financial and Business Management System, agency officials have spent plenty of time explaining to Congress and the public why millions of dollars were wasted on yet another doomed project.
But what often is overlooked by auditors and headline-hungry congressmen are the successful ERP projects—and there have been quite a few in recent years.
Slowly, agencies are learning from past mistakes. One such success story is the Transportation Department’s implementation of the Oracle Federal Financial 11i e-Business suite.
Starting in 1997, DOT began moving from an internally developed legacy system to a commercial application with no customization. A year ago, Trans- portation was named as a center of excellence for the Financial Management Line of Business initiative.
Avoid customization
Officials said they succeeded by changing business processes to fit the capabilities of the software, instead of changing the software to match the agency’s “unique” needs, said Larry Neff, Transportation’s deputy chief financial officer. Neff has been involved with the implementation of the Oracle product, named Delphi, since 2000.
An ERP system connects all back-end management systems, including financial, human resources and procurement, and gathers and presents data in a usable way.
The move to the new system was gradual, which turned out to be crucial in making sure it went smoothly across the agency.
“We realized it was not going to be perfect at first, so we didn’t try to do all the business process reengineering up front,” Neff said.
Transportation did things right, said Wayne Bobby, a vice president in Oracle’s public-sector group. DOT stuck with its vision, implementing the same software for all Transportation agencies.
“Some things went easy, but some were like pulling teeth, like getting some of these agencies to come on board,” Bobby said.
Today, the system produces financials for the entire department or for individual agencies.
Transportation brought Delphi into production at its smaller agencies first to gain experience with implementation be- fore deploying to its larger agencies. The Federal Railroad Administration was first on board in 2000. The last arrival, the Federal Aviation Administration, went live in late 2003.
By the time the implementation team, led by then-deputy CFO Tom Park, deployed Delphi throughout Transportation agencies, they had performed the process 14 times.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
