Alabama county mulls whether to keep, jettison SAP

IDG News Service - Trouble with an SAP implementation in Jefferson County, Alabama, has county officials there pondering whether to fix the system or move on to an alternative.

Jefferson County has spent about $12 million putting in the system, which went live a few years ago, but it is still not working as desired, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Hager said in an interview Monday. The main problem lies in generating reports, he said. "They're not formatted in the manner that we want. They're difficult to produce."

Hager is planning to spend the next four to six months evaluating the best course of action. In the meantime, he's been fielding a deluge of phone calls about what to do, he said.

"They want to know what the problems are. There are camps that want to keep it, camps that want to change it and camps somewhere in between," he said of the system, which has garnered varying opinions in local media.

SAP is well aware of the situation in Jefferson County and is keen to help resolve the problems, said Mark Testoni, president of SAP public services.

A third-party consulting firm handled the Jefferson County implementation, and the reports of problems with it caught SAP off-guard, he said.

"They were operating successfully to our knowledge," he said. "We were somewhat surprised that they were looking to change direction. We want to go down there and be as supportive as we can."

Some of the newer tools and practices at SAP's disposal should help resolve the difficulties, Testoni said. "If the reporting issues are a concern, we can assess that relatively quickly."

"What I want to do is get in front of the key customer officials and get a more direct lay of the land," he added. "Then we'll see what the best direction to go is. The last thing we want is customers that are unhappy."

SAP is scheduled to attend a meeting on the project next week.

Jefferson County isn't the only SAP customer experiencing problems of late. Last week, officials in Marin County, California, decided to scrap an ailing SAP system and seek out a new one, believing that doing so would cost far less money than trying to fix it.

The project is also the subject of a lawsuit Marin County filed against system integrator Deloitte Consulting. Marin officials claim that Deloitte used inexperienced consultants on the implementation. Deloitte has said the allegations are unfounded, and it is pursuing a counterclaim against Marin for unpaid fees.

In Jefferson's case, choosing SAP at all may have been a bad move given its population of 665,000, said Altimeter Group analyst Ray Wang.