My dinner on Wednesday -- buns:
My supper every day -- never-ending work:
Yes, i've not been blogging for almost a week. Have been working like crazy.
I'm supposed to be at home now, but my boss wanted to postpone our flight to tomorrow so that we could have a full day here. Then he only made that decision last night and arranged for the flight change this morning. We couldn't get on tomorrow's morning flight anymore and gotta take the afternoon one back, which means that by the time i reached SG, it will be 7pm already. Because i didn't bring the SG house keys along, 貝 gotta go into SG from JB, pick me up and then return to JB again. So, the weekend is basically gone.
I'm so tired of talking now. For the whole of this week, i gotta guide the users on the system testing, one after another. I gotta repeat similar things over and over again. This was kinda like a déjà vu of my previous job, the endless user testing.
Oh yes, it is endless. After going through this painstaking exercise, listening to endless whining about how lousy the system is, my big boss still wants us to do another round more thoroughly. So, the plan is to fly us back here one week later.
What i found the most difficult part is that the employees here in Taiwan simply do not work in a corporate manner. They are still very much working with a family business mentality. They don't see the bigger picture, and they don't understand why they are doing this whole thing. They just take it as such a chore and as if they were doing it for us, forgetting that this is their system, not ours; it's gonna be them to have to use it everyday in their work, not us.
They simply don't have the concept of system testing; they thought of the sessions as training and did not really bother to test the scenarios that i took so much time to come up with. They would just listen to me explaining to them how a particular function works, and then they would say, "Ok, i understand how to do now", and then they'd marked PASSED for the items (without really testing it). Some might simply tested a few, and then asked, "So am i done? Can i go now?" And some even refused to test anything and took it as a complain session to bash how the new system sucks, how it will add on to their workload, how good their current system is, how they are gonna suffer greatly, how lousy the Chinese translation in the system is, how stupid the UK HQ is to design and build a system like this that does not cater to the needs of Chinese (or should i said Taiwanese?), yadda yadda yadda...
Seriously, i don't see the point of asking them to do this whole damn thing again. It will just end up the same, and even worse, it adds on to their resentment, as they will think why we need to occupy their time again and again to do the "training". These wasted energy and time might as well be spent on testing the system thoroughly ourselves.
But then again, i do see their points. Indeed, to implement a system in Asia that was built based on UK business model simply cannot work. The culture, attitude, customers, operational flow and requirements are different. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to expect a one-size-fits-all kind of system that can be implemented globally without tweaking it to cater for the specific needs. In the end, the users and business need to fit the system by doing more work, rather than having a system that makes their work more efficient.
Frankly, after being an ERP system implementer for so many years, i kinda feel that the idea of having an ERP system means lesser work is nothing but a myth. Perhaps it was too idealistic of me to hope that there is really a business system out there that can truly better the people's lives by making their jobs more efficient and effective.
ERP system is good in providing information for analysis and reporting, but in order to have that benefit, the people at the front line gotta ensure the data is input into the system. The more the downstream wanna analyze, the more the upstream gotta do; the more the top people wanna control, the more restrictions (and hence less flexibility) the bottom people will have; the more standardization the corporate wants, the less localization the branches have.
Sadly, a lot of management and users have this expectation that by having an ERP system, the workload will be lessened. Some even think of cutting headcount after having a new system, but only to find that more people are needed to cope with the added work of maintaining a new system.
Of course, i believe there are systems that actually ease the work of the people, but i wonder if the success rate is high. Unless it's a system that is built from scratch and specifically for the business, any ERP systems that are customized from a standard package will bound to require some workarounds as well as the business changing the current way of doing things.
Yet, one of the biggest challenges in implementing a new system is managing the resistance to change. It is inevitable that people will compare, but a lot of times the comparison is done based on uneven ground. It has never crossed their minds that the so-called "difficult to use" is due to unfamiliarity of a new system. It is the learning curve that everyone must go through, just like when they first implemented their current system years ago. If you don't understand the terms used in the new system, learn it, instead of making a fuss about why certain things aren't called a certain way. I mean, what good is there to keep talking about these minute stuff, when all you gotta do is just to give everyone some time to pick up the new way of calling that certain things.
Ok, i guess i'm the one who's doing the whining now. Well, i was engaged in a heated argument with the most difficult manager in the Taiwan company today, and i kinda lost my cool and raised my voice (since she cut me off loudly). Out of the whole episode, the most frustrating thing is that instead of addressing other more important issues, she kept harping on why one particular label on the screen was translated in a particular way. She claimed that by translating it in such a way, her staff wouldn't understand what it meant.
Yeah, maybe she was right, there indeed were some ambiguities in the terms, which couldn't be changed due to some system limitations. But after using the system for a few times, the users will definitely know what it means. What good is there to keep asking why it was translated like that, why UK couldn't change it to cater to the Chinese way of saying things (because it is a global system, heeellloooo?!), why the system couldn't gear more towards the Taiwanese needs (erm, because the world doesn't revolve around Taiwan?!)... bla bla bla...
It just drained all my energy out to talk to such person. Really, it was like talking to a brick wall, or maybe worse, because at least a brick wall won't talk back at you incessantly about unimportant thing that doesn't worth the effort to fix.
Anyway, am just glad that i can be back to my familiar working place on Monday, getting away from all these people for a week. It's for me to re-charge before i'm back to the battle field again.
