InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
December 22, 1997
Federal Site Drops SAP
Budget, corporate reasons citedBy Tom Stein
"This is very disappointing," says Bob Salvucci, president of the SAP unit, which was unveiled last week. "We'll have to grin and bear it."
A federal budget cut forced the cancellation, says a spokesman for Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which manages the Savannah River nuclear site for the Department of Energy. Westinghouse had planned to install SAP's financial, manufacturing, human resources, and applications, but the government effectively budgeted $70 million less for the Aiken, S.C., plant for fiscal 1998 than for fiscal 1997. Thus, $47 million earmarked for the SAP project in 1998 will be diverted to other initiatives.
The i
ntegrated SAP system would have replaced 30 to 40 disparate applications, streamlining operations by automating certain tasks and doing away with excessive administration. The implementation, being handled by Computer Sciences Corp., would also have solved Westinghouse SRC's year 2000 problems.
"But we looked at our budget and determined there were projects more important than this one," the Westinghouse spokesman says. The company now plans to tackle year 2000 issues in a separate $14 million project.
Some people who worked on the SAP project blame the cancellation on a lack of executive support, project overruns, and a desire to save jobs. "This project would have changed how people work and reduced staffing by half," says Hanif Sarangi, a former CSC consultant who managed the implementation. "It was the easiest thing to cut because people did not have the stomach for it."
Lance Grider, a contractor brought in to work on the SAP project, agrees. "A lot of people did not want this project to succ
eed," he says. "They were dancing in the halls when it got canceled." Westinghouse SRC is sensitive to payroll cuts because its staff has been cut nearly in half, to 12,500, since the early 1990s. However, the Westinghouse spokesman minimizes the impact the SAP project would have had.
"I don't think it would have had that much overall effect on personnel," he says.
Executive support for the project evaporated when the top officials who backed it quit in October, say Sarangi and Grider. In addition, Sarangi says, the project was going slower than expected. Westinghouse wanted a big-bang implementation by October 1998, but CSC told the company it would be more realistic to plan a phased-in approach extending well into 1999.
The Westinghouse spokesman declined to comment on the alleged delays or lack of management support.
federal nuclear site that SAP intended to show off as a customer of the company's new public-sector subsidiary has canceled its massive SAP implementation, after spending nearly six months and $10 million on the project.
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