The Road Ahead

As I mentioned in a previous post, our corporate entity has decided on a one size fits all information/reporting system to go into all of our facilities, including ours. The bad part about it is that this decision will have a serious impact on the final outcome of my project. To re-iterate, the main parts of my project are a dynamically optimizing control system, a web based reporting system and a supervisory control/tuning system. We met with the IT person who is in charge of the one size fits all reporting system about 2 weeks ago. The plan is to take a system that was internally developed at one of our other facilities and merge it with a commercial system that is currently in prototype stages. Talk about a Frankenstein system! I don't understand this decision at all. I think that it had to have been more political than technical. This thing is going to be one sorry/buggy POS. They are planning on having this in place in 16 months. That is approximately 15 installations (custom development required at each installation) in 16 months. They have not even started the merge yet. I just don't see it happening. I have been on a team that did a merge of 2 large systems. It was a hell of a lot of work and took over a year, not counting the regression testing. I doubt that these guys know what regression testing is. They will probably skip most of the testing and go right to installation.

Back to my topic. We have decided that even though we are getting another reporting system that will no doubt overlap and duplicate functionality, we are going to proceed with the project as normal. We are in agreement that we will not see the corporate system for at least 2 years, possibly more. During that time, we have a gap to fill and this project will do it. In addition, this project will provide process control that the corporate system can not do. Our challenge in the long term will be finding a way to install and live with the corporate system, but not give up any of the process control functionality. It is never easy.