3/3/2015 (T-6) CHA-CHING!!

3/3/2015 (T-6) CHA-CHING!!

We purchased licensing for 25 users. We have at least 42 users (at last count). We have 24 user licenses in our current system that are shared between our facility and remote #1. One of the selling points of the new software was that all of the production employees could use one license (since the licenses are sold as 'named users'.

We got off to a late start today. The lead consultant was working on some of the system setups until about 10:30 am. I had asked late last night that we go visit the lady that puts our BOMs into the system to test the BOM import program. She had exported a number of Bills from our CAD software yesterday in anticipation of getting the bills into the new system. It was decided yesterday by the plant.manager that we would not pull over any of the existing BOMs out of the current system because they were deemed too inaccurate. We have been using the same process for over a year to import BOM into the system from CAD. I wonder how the new bills are going to be more accurate that the records that could have been converted.

An attempt was made to import one of our master models that was released by engineering yesterday. The import program blew up. The lead consultant spent about half an hour troubleshooting, then had to stop to head to training the controller on some more tasks.

About an hour and a half was spent attempting to make the controller more comfortable in the new system. It was quality training, concentrating on navigating through the system, knowing how to perform specific tasks and answering process questions.

We returned to the engineering department to check in on the BOM import program. About 30 more minutes were spent troubleshooting. One of the issues was discovered. A potential workaround was given along with direction to try to import some smaller sub-assemblies. She emailed me about 2 hours later letting me know that she was successful in getting 4 small assemblies imported, then it failed on the next several she worked on. She gave up and left work...knowing we couldn't get back to her until tomorrow (maybe).

We spent a great deal of the afternoon training for parts sales, warranty, service and repairs. One of the sales people used the new system in the past. He also came from our competitor. He was requesting to change several of our processes to match the way he was used to working at his previous employment. He indicated how much easier it would be in the new system to do it with the requested changes. Some of them were logical and easy enough to change processes. Some of the requests would require a significant amount of time to implement. Man of the discussions were tabled.

We walked through several different types of transactions...in theory. The system wasn't adequately set up to be able to complete several of the transactions. None of the data had been converted from the current system, so performing queries, looking at reports and basic navigation was severely hindered. Reminiscing about the 'good old days' became a higher priority than further training.

The day was wrapped up with about 15 minutes of administrative training. I finally learned the programs required to set up users, user roles and custom menus. The plant manager indicated that she would help with a majority of that setup, since the admin programs are far from intuitive. You have to know the program names to enter them into the archaic  setup programs.

I was notified that the VPN was working. I tried to set up a new computer to access the software and discovered the port was blocked by the firewall. I was notified it was fixed again. After testing again, discovered we were receiving certificate errors. The new issue is being addressed. We may have to get tech support from Oracle to help fix this issue.

I am pretty sure this was a major concern for me during the kick off meeting, but was dismissed because it should only take an hour to set up a VPN. I am not quite sure when an hour was redefined to be such a long stretch of time. I guess we do still have 6 days before go live, as  well as a work around to bypass our firewall.