By Siobhan Kennedy
In a damning indictment of PeopleSoft’s famous customer satisfaction mantra, eight of the Big Ten US universities have pooled their collective muscle and written to CEO Craig Conway slamming the poor performance, poor quality and poor deployment of their PeopleSoft applications, ComputerWire has learned.
The letter, dated November 22, was sent by the senior administrators from eight of the Big Ten institutions, including the universities of Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin-Madison and Ohio State. In it, the officials complain about the simply unacceptable performance of their respective PeopleSoft implementations. As a consequence, we are missing business events and/or having to put in place expensive contingencies and workarounds that inevitably leave our customers and staff unhappy with PeopleSoft, they said.
The performance is especially poor on large batch programs such as tuition calculation, they said, adding that the process took some six hours to run. The message agent is too slow and doesn’t have a true API, they continued. Interactive panel performance is extremely poor, especially when numerous panel may be required for single function.
The administrators went on to criticize the quality of the software itself, characterizing it as another major problem. The letter said there were too many bugs and patches breaking other parts of the system…packaging, new releases and fixes are not well tested and poorly deployed. Documentation, it said, is inadequate or non-existent.
Given that PeopleSoft prides itself on customer satisfaction, receiving a letter of this nature from eight of the largest US universities will come as a severe blow to the ERP vendor. After months of financial turmoil and management upheaval, PeopleSoft is desperately trying to re-establish itself as serious player to compete against the likes of SAP AG and Oracle Corp.
But Laura King, director of marketing for PeopleSoft’s education and government division, downplayed the criticisms. We’re delighted to get these kinds of letters, she told ComputerWire. When you develop software and deliver software to such large populations, like colleges and universities, they are bound to have competing needs and different priorities. She added that the CEO Craig Conway had agreed to meet with the university officials in the first week of January to discuss their issues.
Despite that, King went on to describe the contracts as very successful projects, adding that in the majority of institutions represented in the letter, most had their PeopleSoft applications up and running. All the business functions of the universities are running, they’ve moved from their legacy systems and silos to environments with shared information and data across the network.
King said she could not be specific as to which universities were running which particular applications but added that all had some or all of PeopleSoft’s finance, human resources and student administration products. The universities urged PeopleSoft to work with them to solve their problems and went on to offer the company copies of all their internal data for PeopleSoft to test. They added that they have begun to create multi-institution working groups with that purpose in mind.
Joshua Greenbaum, head of Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley, California, said the letter reveals a certain desperation on the part of the universities. The fact that they felt the need to write a joint letter and use their collective clout indicates that PeopleSoft has not been responsible in the past, he said. It tells me PeopleSoft’s not been minding the store.
More significantly, Greenbaum said the criticisms were an indication that PeopleSoft’s customer satisfaction advantage was beginning to slip. In particular, the fact that performance and responsiveness are highlighted as the first and foremost concerns make this issue all the more significant for PeopleSoft, he said.
Performance should not be an issue in 1999 with an enterprise system. It was something we worried about five or six years ago, he said. Something’s clearly wrong at Pleasanton.
Greenbaum didn’t think there was any reason to assume the universities would opt to ditch their implementations altogether. It’s harder to throw out the applications than to try and push PeopleSoft in the right direction, he said.
He added: But the timing’s certainly bad for them, to be hit like this in one of their core markets with their core products. Considering the turmoil and some of the brain drain that’s gone on recently, one has to wonder whether or not they’re keeping their eye on the ball.
