German software giant SAP has defended itself against claims that it was at fault for the €345m write-off by Deutsche Post-DHL due to its abandoned New Forwarding Environment (NFE) IT renewal programme.
The company said: “Recent media reports suggest there is a connection between SAP and ...
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Comment on this article
Peter Mancuso
December 02, 2015 at 7:15 pmWonder when Panalpina will finally wake up from the ‘perfect dream’ of SAP TM solving all their internal issues, now that DGF abandoned ship…
Teaba
May 30, 2020 at 8:17 pmI didn’t know Panalpina went the same root. I hope they have wake up earlier than DHL, unless SAP learnt from DHL disaster.
Ross
December 02, 2015 at 10:24 pmStructured architecture can be a significant party in an enterprise system development failure if it inhibits developers. This sits outside the realm of a developmental roles and contracts.
If the architecture was part of the problem SAP would be judged here to have come up with a strawman in response. Any whiff of a case being merely being plausibly deniable no longer cuts the mustard in commercial terms. German companies should have learned well enough by now to be cautious and ‘fess up if they are party to significant commercial issues. They should also never see themselves as being so far down the track in the engineering sense that they can’t take severe corrective measures if required.
At Gilead we have addressed the process cadre cult of recent decades and defined a specific role for transportation enterprise middleware in the E-commerce age.
R E Krem
December 14, 2015 at 11:02 pmDHL is and always be a 1 eyed cyclops, no vision, no leadership, no execution: despicable organization,, 1st hand knowledge after 4 yrs executive Management …disgraceful
Taeba
May 30, 2020 at 8:15 pmThe main problem with NFE implementation was not the “change management” as guessed by Ryan Petersen. The original DHL management was good, unfortunately the Chroatian (if I remember correctly) advisor was not. I believe she was responsible for employing an external company to write down the requirements, it was a disaster because they did not align with the requirements collected by DHL staff. But this was only a tip of an iceberg. The main problem was that it was not possible to adopt SAP to forwarding needs especially when, to most of the requirements, the SAP specialists were always saying “this is the system standard” or something like that. It’s difficult to remember after so many years.
DHL GF would do a much better job if they developed an in-house system which would suit all their needs instead of trying to adopt a system which was never built for forwarders.
Ryan Petersen was right in a way about management, there were problems. There were many good people who lost their jobs, people who were brave enough to say that this system will never work, some of them worked for DHL for 10-20 years. A few people even lost their lives during implementation, some suspected that they had a heart attack because they were under too much stress.