$50M SAP Rollout Runs Into Trouble in Tacoma

Computerworld - Cost overruns, glitches and other bumps hit during a $50 million-plus rollout of SAP AG's ERP, CRM and other business applications in the city of Tacoma, Wash., have generated a storm of bad press and end-user complaints, and a call from a city councilor for an audit to determine the causes of the problems.
Some Tacoma administrators said they believe that overall, the year-old implementation of SAP R/3 has been successful. But they acknowledged that complaints about the system's payroll, billing, budgeting and customer service performance have proved to be a thorny problem.
Moreover, the city has had to pay nearly $700,000 to Tacoma-based integrator TUI Consulting Inc. for unforeseen customization work.
"They threw the switch at one time, and a lot of failures happened," said Scott Huntley, communications supervisor for the city. The extensive project gave the city an integrated system to run all general operations, such as police, fire and utilities. End users learning to use the new system initially complained about implementation problems, he said.
Of late, the most pressing issues have been problems with the financial module, which have led to delays in hammering out the city's budget. There have also been performance issues with the SAP CRM software that supports the city's five utilities.
Tacoma's system problems have become so prominent that city councilor Julie Anderson last month filed a resolution calling for an audit.
"The City of Tacoma is experiencing unanticipated costs in operating the system, and there are significant gaps between our expectations for functionality and how the SAP system currently operates," Anderson said in an e-mail. "As an elected official, I am unable to determine if these issues are due to SAP software, management of City of Tacoma employees, or poor consulting services from TUI."
Problem Areas
"Technically, 99% of the system is working fine," said Mark Crisson, CEO of Tacoma Public Utilities. The problems have tended to be mostly the result of implementing new processes and formats that SAP supports, he said.
For instance, some of the bills the CRM application generated were difficult to understand compared with their prior format and led to a flood of service requests, Crisson said. The city had to add staffers to handle the increase in requests and paid $270,000 to TUI to make modifications.
Tacoma now has a much-desired work management system to help support job-order fulfillment. However, utility service representatives have to plow through as many as five screens to access customer data. That forced the city to sign a $405,000 contract with