Bad karma

And now a tale of woe with a moral…

Hugger-Mugger Yoga Products, a supplier of yoga-related products, announced an unsuccessful tale of software implementation, offering their sad story perhaps as cautionary tale. Hugger-Mugger had built its US $5 million business in typical fashion, using a variety of software products and attempting to integrate as it went. Finally, the company chose a single open-source ERP package to tie things up. Compiere was the ERP packages chosen.

Despite having the necessary modules, though, the Compiere program was less the successful. In all fairness, though, the problems most likely had little to do with the Compiere software itself. Hugger-Mugger company president Hugh Chamberlain was forced to tell www.SearchOpenSource.com that “[The IT staff] didn’t do any pre-work. They just installed Compiere … They didn’t understand that ERP is very complicated, and moving from point solutions to an integrated suite requires a whole different way of looking at the business. Most people take about a year of preparation.”

Hugger-Mugger users were left with no beta testing possibilities and no training. Chamberlain also stated that the IT team “set it up from an IT perspective.” The result was a lot more clicking and order entry that sometimes took ten times longer than is seemingly necessary. Many data entry and data routing mistakes have occurred since. Chamberlain’s story has been reported in the above-mentioned SearchOpenSource.com and appears elsewhere.

At the online software implementation forum at http://projectfailures.com, Hugger-Mugger’s story runs with that ever-useful note, “Don’t let this happen to you!”