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Monday, January 14, 2008

Problem in Stopping the Instance!!

Have you experienced this before? Something that I am not able to understand...

Every time you go for a project in an organization where ERP is already implemented, one of the key issues raised by management is this.

"We can't stop ERP for a long time. We have production schedules and shipping schedules to be adhered to. If we stop ERP now, this will suffer"

I tell them that we are not asking the organization to stop the physical activities. They can continue with production, shipping etc. What I am asking is to delay the data entry in the system by a few hours...

Most of the time, the realization dawns and the organization is able to release the system for our activities...

Have you ever faced this issue? How do you tackle this? Is my logic right or is there any basic points that I am missing out here? Any input is welcome...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is an operational viewpoint :)

Darn operations always thinks they cannot afford to be down for a minute or the worlkd will end. We have made this a lesser pain by running a complete shutdow and restart the weekend before a production release so that we ensure that all of the shutdown and startup activities work without the complication of having to perform any other work. Then the next weekend we brought the system down again, according to the updated plan, did our work and brought the system back up as a well rehearsed act with know unforseen events occuring.

Now given, we had not planned on the "mock" run the weekend before, but had ran into a showstopper while doing the final procduction backup with our EMC snapshot capability which had pushed us to stop and start everything back up on the prior weeekend.

Looking back on this project i see that in highly integrated ERP systems, a pre-shut-down excercise proved invaluable on the following weekend where we ran an upgrade and brought the system back up in a record 30 hours ahead of schedule. The client was quite please with the sucess of the final upgrade effort, but if we hadn't of had that pre-weeekend to have gone through all of the exercises of shutting down and starting back up, i am convinced it would not have been near as smooth.

Forgive any typo's i didn't proof read this :)

V K Ramaswamy said...

I agree that in a major activity like upgrades where you need to shut down the system for an extended period of time, this is a valid point.
But surprisingly, I have seen this argument being propounded even for shut down for 2-3 Hours.