Project Everest Part One

Corporate managers are some amazingly brain dead people. Because they seldom have any creative business ideas of their own these fools eagerly latch on to whatever so-called new industry trends happen to blow across their desks. I've seen many stupid initiatives and programs rapidly forced into place only to be discarded just as quickly or simply allowed to wither on the vine and fade from view. The constant factor is we waste more time and cash flow on each one of these hairbrained schemes. For the past year I have been closely watching one of the biggest disasters to ever hit this company. That disaster has been called "Project Everest" by our CEO Super Geek and his cronies. Apparently they refuse to call the project by it's real name due to some legally binding contractual obligation which makes no sense to me.

Project Everest is Oracle, which you may have heard of before. Oracle is a company that builds software databases for customers with an emphasis on web-browser styled user interface. In order to switch to Oracle's software a company has to spend a lengthy amount of time consulting with them about what kind of data systems are needed, beta test their software builds, train employees in it's use, and switch from existing in-house software systems to Oracle's stuff. Something this big doesn't happen over night, and in our case we've been working with Oracle for a damn long time.

We went live with Oracle's systems recently and you know what happened that day? Everything fucking imploded. I mean, our shit was wrecked and bad. Customers could no longer place orders for instruments, production lines were unable to get parts and supplies. Administrators could not see real time where work in progress was out on the shop floor. Inventory went haywire, which threw the bean counters in accounting and finance into a tailspin. Assembly workers who were supposed to use Oracle to move products from station to station quickly discovered they either didn't have enough training to understand how to get the systems to function properly or Oracle just didn't function properly.

Before we flipped that switch to go live with Oracle all of our existing internally designed software systems were still working fine like they always had been. Seeing a company wide emergency situation develop within hours of Oracle's deployment I found myself wondering why in the hell we bought this junk. And who talked the corporate board into thinking this was a good idea?