Rodent Regatta

PAVING THE COW PATHS
Re-engineer? We can’t re-engineer; this was never engineered to begin with!

Ford, Caterpillar Team With SAP on Supply Chain Project. ”After evaluating various software vendors, Ford and Caterpillar found that no packaged applications currently on the market could fully meet their needs. The two companies decided to work with SAP, which had about 80% of the requirements in place.” (By Marc L. Songini for Computerworld, 8/5/2002.) [Brent Sleeper’s Web Journal]

For a company famous for saying, ”Quality is Job 1,” this project appears to be quite a contradiction. Rather than determine why they are having to manage 600,000 parts, they are launching one of the largest software undertakings of its kind. There’s lots of good rhetoric about ROI and ”rigorous governance process,” but what are we really trying to do here? Isn’t this an automobile company that’s trying to provide quality transportation to its customers?