Written by Helene Abrams Wednesday, March 10 2010
When you moved into the new house, everything was clean, uncluttered, and ready for you to personalize and adapt to meet your needs. So it is when you first implement an ERP system. However, many people bring with them boxes of things no longer needed – data and structures from their legacy system that were once required or that the users have simply become accustomed to. Once you move into the house, you begin accumulating stuff that looked like a good idea at the time, but now sits in a corner and collects dust. Even worse, those obsolete items need to be moved and re-boxed, and every time you need something, you might spend hours or days looking for it. Feng shui practitioners believe that clutter is low, stagnant, and confusing energy that drains energy from you. Depending on the area of your home where your clutter is located, it can also negatively influence, or even completely block, the flow of events in specific areas of your life. Once again, there are many parallels to an ERP system.
Multiple Charts of Accounts or Org Units clutter the business processes and take effort to create workarounds. Hours and days are spent reconciling spreadsheets looking for data that you know is there, but that is “boxed” so that it is not easily found. ERP clutter is a barrier to the sharing of information, to streamlining business processes, and to complying with statutory and regulatory requirements.
After about 10 years of living in the house, you probably need to make some major modifications to accommodate changes in your lifestyle. Maybe your family has grown and you need to add more space, maybe your children have moved out, or maybe your furnace is not as energy-efficient as you’d like and is costing you a lot of money. Similarly, after a number of years, your ERP system needs to be modified to continue to support your business. You may have acquired some companies, sold part of your business, or want to take advantage of new technologies. The good news is that in the same way that remodeling your house and upgrading your appliances adds value to your house, cleaning up your ERP system adds value to your business in the form of reduced operating costs, reduced hardware, and fewer people for non-value-added activities. In your house, once you clear most of your clutter with feng shui and have a clear system to avoid its accumulation in the future, you will start experiencing high energy levels, more clarity, and a heightened sense of well-being. In your business, once you clear the clutter left from years of ERP accommodations, you will start experiencing greater visibility to the entire enterprise, transparency in your financial transactions, less complexity, and the ability to drive value from new initiatives.
Click here to learn how to reduce ERP clutter...
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January Puzzle
A traveler gets lost on a deserted island and finds himself surrounded by a group of n cannibals.
Each cannibal wants to eat the traveler but, as each knows, there is a risk. A cannibal that attacks and eats the traveler would become tired and defenseless. After he eats, he would become an easy target for another cannibal (who would also become tired and defenseless after eating).
The cannibals are all hungry, but they cannot trust each other to cooperate. The cannibals happen to be well versed in game theory, so they will think before making a move.
Does the nearest cannibal, or any cannibal in the group, devour the lost traveler?
Solution
The short answer is the traveler’s fate depends on the parity of the group. If there is an odd number of canibals, the traveler will be eaten, but if there is an even number, the traveler will survive.
To prove this, we will consider small groups and use mathematical induction to explain the solution for larger groups.
Case n = 1: this is an obvious case. If there is one cannibal, the traveler will be eaten. It doesn’t matter that the cannibal will get tired because there are no other cannibals around as a threat.
Case n = 2: this is a more interesting case. Each cannibal wishes to each the traveler, but each knows he cannot. If either cannibal eats the traveler, then he will become defenseless and the other one will eat him. So each cannibal uses backwards induction to realize that the only strategy is to not eat the traveler. The hapless traveler finds a bit of luck, therefore, and actually survives.
Case n = 3: this is where the problem gets interesting. The best strategy is for the closest cannibal to make a move and eat the traveler. The cannibal will be defenseless after eating, but ultimately he will be safe. Why is that? The reasoning is due to induction: once the cannibal eats the traveler, the resulting situation has 2 unfed cannibals and the 1 defenseless cannibal. But as we just showed above, when there are 2 unfed cannibals, neither will make a move for fear of being eaten by the other! Thus the first cannibal to make a move will be safe as the remaining 2 cannibals block each other.
We can prove the higher cases using mathematical induction. If the number n is odd, then the closest cannibal can safely eat the traveler because the remaining number of unfed cannibals is even (and by induction, with an even number of unfed cannibals no one makes a move). If the number n is even, then no cannibal will eat the traveler, for if he did, the remaining number of cannibals would be odd, meaning he will get eaten by the induction hypothesis.
Success Tips for Oracle Project Management
- Create a standard for documentation at the beginning of your project, and hold team members accountable for completing documentation requirements as well as keeping them at and above the standards required.
- Before promulgating user documentation or training, it’s also a good idea to choose a representative from the among the business users base to review materials first.
- If you are not sure about the resources and budget required, obtain several estimates from people that have experience with the same size and scope of your project.
- Be explicit, before beginning the project, what internal resources are required for execution. This includes people, infrastructure, hardware, and software.
- Help the project champion understand the impact your project will have on the organization and how its successful completion will make him or her an internal hero or heroine for supporting it.
- Break up your project into smaller projects (try for projects that can be completed in 4-6 months, especially early on) to get success and demonstrate momentum.
- Make sure that your testing includes reports, upstream and downstream interfaces, customizations, enhancements, and workflows.
- Ensure that comprehensive transition reports and meetings between departing and incoming personnel are completed.
- Instead of spending time and resources implementing third-party reporting, consider consolidating multiple instances, moving to a global chart of accounts (CoA), and/or standardizing on a consistent calendar.
- Include governance, risk, and compliance management as part of the project plan.
- Finally, celebrate the successes. Too many projects focus on defects, failures, or small cost over-runs without looking at the big picture and what was accomplished.
The Analyst Corner
John Van Decker, Research VP of Gartner, states:
"A single chart of accounts allows consistency in financial reporting across the enterprise by standardizing on common metrics and reporting structures, reduces dependencies on a separate financial consolidation system, and significantly reduces the costs incurred with ongoing, complex conversions and translations."
