Curt Sardeson's Blog

I was reading a blog post by Trevor Miles the other day and found this sentence that sums up perfectly why software implementations (WMS, TMS, LMS, ERP, etc.) are so hard. Not only do you need the right people to define the future state, you need the right people with the right skills and experience to get you there!

Analyzing a situation is fairly easy, defining a future state is a lot harder, but the really hard part is defining the path to achieve the future state.

- Trevor Miles

I was listening to a podcast this morning called Six Pixels of Separation while working out and I heard a definition of experience by Liz Strauss that really made sense. Liz said that experience is the time invested in having to face a whole lot of decisions. She further goes on to say that the difference between a 35 year old and 40 year old is not necessarily the skill set, but rather the number of decisions they have faced. I love this definition of experience.

I was looking over our sales figures by customer last week, and I started to spot a interesting trend. At Open Sky we typically have 2 types of customers that we work with. They are either a customer who is starting a implementation of a Supply Chain Execution System (SCES) such as a Warehouse Management System (WMS), Transportation Management System (TMS), a Labor Management System (LMS), or a combination of the above. Or they are a customer who has implemented one or more of these systems and the system is not meeting their expectations and they need to fix it.

What I found very interesting is that our customers who engaged Open Sky at the beginning of an implementation project spent about the same amount of money as our customers who engaged Open Sky for a get well project. While we don’t know what our customers total spend was for the SCSE system implementation, I think it is reasonable to assume that the total spend was more with a system that needed to be fixed than one that worked from the start.

I do plan to spend more time looking into this data to see if I can find out why the numbers are so similar. My suspicion at this point is that the original implementation took some shortcuts that eventually caught up with the system or the original team made some bad choices.

So it would appear that the following quote does apply to SCES implementations:

It takes less time to do things right than to explain why you did it wrong.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow