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There is a thing called "tax payers" who pays for everything and this is an endless bottomless pit of money at their disposal. The only reason that Oracle is not being paid is because some cadres need to stuff their nest eggs with that money and maybe throw some money at SAA, but also with the intent to gather the money in cadre nest eggs.
so the new CEO hasn't shone a light into the deep dark hole of Eskoms Procurement department yet?
I've never seen an Oracle product that could be dropped in and used - it usually required many millions of Rands customisation and implementation. No ERP product gets dropped in and used, and they tend to keep sucking money too over the years. Odoo was mentioned as the best-known example of an enterprise ERP system and actually 90 other energy supply companies are using (https://www.odoo.com/customers/industry/energy-supply-4) it as it covers the full range including manufacturing, inventory, purchase, maintenance, IoT, quality control, field service, planning, etc apart from the obvious core solutions. But to repeat no alternative will be an immediate solution.
Even if you have vendor support often I try fix the issues myself where possible. Only if it gets to the real extreme like hardware failure or some odd errors do I hand over to the vendor.
Certainly agreed. I've seen SAP and Oracle ERP implementations and know how much time and ongoing money both took. No replacement of a system (legacy or ERP) is ever a 'drop-in' solution. For government, it makes a lot of sense to invest in something you can run the distance on without having to rip it out and replace it in a few years, something where 100% of the revenue is retained in country and can benefit local partners, and that can be adapted and re-used in different SOEs and Depts without re-inventing all the consultancy costs. It was done with Alfresco as an enterprise ECM product where government runs the solution at no extra cost to the benefit of multiple departments (some employed local companies to support but others ran it themselves).
Well you do eliminate the massive foreign licensing costs. The onsite consulting and support still needs to get done, but the big issue raised by Eskom was that licensing cost. So yes there is still that same local component cost that is paid for support but at least it is 100% local and does not go offshore, and they are free to use alternative companies because there is no vendor lock-in.
Open source usually comes in two models: A paid hosted solution (which is really hosting costs plus support) or you can install itself free of any purchase/license cost but then you support it yourself (or you pay a local Odoo partner to support it for you onsite). Yes any ERP is going to have support costs, as well as customisation costs (even Oracle), and such a replacement is never instantaneous - a year is minimum and often it takes two years to replace something complex.
It's never going to happen with a company the size of Eskom. Would you see a vehicle manufacturer do this? Or a pharmaceutical company?
Oracle is only part of their ERP landscape, you are right.
Or they can just get Cubans.
Don't see why not as many large companies run off spreadsheets, but seriously they count 136 Heal/Social Welfare organisations as clients including hospitals and medical manufacturers, 89 energy supply companies, and 606 manufacturing clients worldwide. See https://www.odoo.com/customers.
Yes speaking from the experience of an Oracle ERP with finance and sales done in a 1,500 person company with 9 branches around our country.
No it doesn't but it was the example I do know about. Not sure though that Eskom actually manufactures? Their business really is maintenance and contract/tender management. Those two areas were covered in our ERP implementation. We had a look at dedicated maintenance applications but realised that all plant equipment/IT/etc is a description, category, serial number, quantity, location, owner, warranty period, maintenance contract, depreciation period, etc with related trouble-ticketing, that was really generic to everything including even medical equipment, as far as asset tracking and maintaining it goes.
They don't run off spreadsheets. They use proper ERP exported to spreadsheets for data manipulation.
Do you perhaps work for this open source software company?
