Helping users understand why the ERP project was happening in the first place, though, was a major concern for Children's. Posters, internal e-mail messages and director-level missives got the word out, but the focus was on the big picture. Also, Andersen was coordinating the initial user training, but Murray was concerned that little attention was being paid to user support post-launch. The hospital's existing helpdesk needed to be integrated into the long-term support of the ERP application. Training and policies needed to be established so calls could be answered properly from Day 1.
When the issue was brought up in meetings with Andersen, it was paid "lip service," says Murray. Finally, Children's assembled a multidisciplinary group--an "A-team" of ERP support comprised of eight to 10 human resources, finance and helpdesk personnel who provided end-user support during go-live. Since that date, the A-team has received nearly 700 phone calls asking for help and information.
This group has yet to be integrated with the hospital's helpdesk and does not use its BMC Remedy trouble-ticket system to track calls. Fortunately, users have gotten more comfortable with the ERP system, so the group has shrunk to one or two "Jacks-of-all-trades," Murray says.
Until this group is "triaged" into the helpdesk, he says, Children's has two support models: one for its PeopleSoft application and one for every other hospital application.
Down and Dirty
While the users and hardware were being prepped for the launch, Leo Judge, Children's manager of financial applications, was doing the real dirty work--the data conversion. Phase I of the PeopleSoft rollout involved replacing every legacy system for HR, payroll, accounts payable, general ledger, asset management, purchasing, inventory and materials management. Quite an undertaking, especially considering there were no fewer than four data formats in the mix: Oracle, RBMS, SQL and Pervasive Software's Btrieve.
While Andersen focused on building new business processes and logic for the PeopleSoft application, Judge's team performed data integrity checks on all the databases being ported into the new Oracle database. Judge had four people from the Children's application development team to assist his group in the conversion process.
"It was a very positive experience," he says, though "some issues arose" before the launch. For example, Judge says his team did not receive timely training on the new application architecture; this left them dependent on consultants longer than originally planned. Part of the problem: The team was stretched thin trying to support those pesky legacy applications. He also says that during the rush to meet the April deadline, Children's was not able to perform adequate end-to-end transactional testing, so performance bottlenecks could not be identified until the application was in production. This caused serious problems with report generation and database performance.
"Very little assistance from the vendor" was forthcoming when it came to database tuning, Judge says, so Children's ended up dedicating a database administrator to the PeopleSoft application for an extended period after the launch. Judge cited one payroll report that took 12 hours to complete before tuning. Since then the DBA and Judge's team have been able to cut report generation down to 90 minutes. Judge stresses that you can never have enough DBA talent for a project of this scope.
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