I received a call a few days ago about attending a conference call. Megacorp is very big on conference calls. Get 50 people on the line and no one know who is saying what. Great waste of time. Anyway, this call was to discuss installing new network equipment in all the former SmallCorp locations, as well as installing new wires in the places that can't prove/document they are cat5 compliant.
I can see the wiring side of this. Most places in SmallCorp have been completely re-wired with CAT5e wire. Whether they can prove or document it is another issue. A handful of place though, had avoided being rewired in the past due to the expense. These handful of places really need it and it's a good idea.
What's NOT a good idea is replacing all the current HP equipment, which is all owned and is 100Mbit in most cases, with leased Cisco equipment. The idea behind this is the Megacorp Datacenter will, maybe, think about possibly managing the local networks down to the port level, maybe possibly sometimes nest year. Okay, this is a benefit, a questionable one since the help desk can't fix the PC's they are supposed to be able to do but, maybe possibly? To spend a ton of money leasing a bunch of stuff just because the datacenter maybe possibly might one day think about managing it? Most of these former Smallcorp places have like 40 PC's. Some have as few as 15. These are not larger facilities that have complex wiring needs.
I also feel you do not need Cisco stuff to manage it. A switch is a switch. Most of these places are small and simple SMNP will work. Heck, I did it here with HP Openview. I was able to manage HP routers and Bay routers and other network components. Megacorp is a big Cisco fan and they are even a bigger fan on leasing and on making you pay for maintenance. These manufacturing places are not making any money as it is with all the new Megacorp charges. Now, add in another 1 or 2 thousand a month for 3 or 5 or 7 hubs/switches and maintenance and they are even more in the red.
Megacorp is really big on maintenance too. When they yanked our Bay and HP routers out for Cisco ones, they came to me and wanted me to compute how much savings there was by replacing the stuff that we owned and that worked with the leased Cisco stuff. (You would have thought this would be one of the questions they ask BEFORE doing a bunch of work. ) I told them nothing. We owned all that equipment. They asked about maintenance. I said nothing again because we don't carry maintenance. They asked why and I explained that we looked at this maintenance thing a few uears back and since we tried to use similar stuff in each place, It was cheaper to keep one or two of each model router and hub/switch in stock in case a replacement was needed. It could be configured at our datacenter and Fed-EX'd out. I went on to say that the annual cost of maintenance on the 26 routers we had, for example, was more than what it cost to buy a couple routers and keep them in stock. They looked at me with great surprise. Sort of "Why didn't we think of that"
Oh yeah, it gets better......... so not only will all the former Smallcorp places have to shoulder the monthy lease cost of these new hubs and stuff, any new wiring and testing/certification of existing wiring is to be done by a wiring company that Megacorp Owns! BBAHAHA!!! Are they any good? Are they qualified? Who knows...... we gotta use them anyway. I guess the Megacorp wiring Biz is suffering and maybe this is a quick way for them to drum up some business. What a scam.
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Our telephone service was cutoff today. It was only some of the lines and with a big SBC truck sitting out in front and some guys in the sewer, I would normally feel the two were related. However, this time I had a sneaking suspicion that it would not be.
I called SBC to find out why these lines were not working. They told me there was an order to turn them off. After going between like 4 SBC departments, I finally got to the collections department and they said the bill hasn't been paid. I acted surprised on the phone and they turned them back on because i said I would get them a check in 3 days. In reality, I was not surpsied and was not sure I could produce a check in 3 days.
The allmightly MegaCorp company has some serious bill payment issues. This happened like 4 months ago. The lines were not totally cut off but, I received a warning letter and had to call them that same day. A call to the AP people at Megacorp showed that the PO phone bills were put against for our location was set up with a term of net 45. Well shit.. you can't pay a utility net 45. They send bills every 30 days and sooner or later, you will get so far behind they will turn your phone off. For whatever reason, not all our lines are not on the same bill. Our Voice lines and Fax's come in on a T1 and other misc lines are analog lines. These were the analog lines that were turned off.
So, today I called and guess what? The PO is still net 45. Not only is it still Net 45, but due to system problems, neither the June or July SBC bill was paid. The July bill was supposed to be paid on 9-11 but, the check was never cut or mailed due to sysem issues. So, we are 2 months behind, maybe more.
I should really clue you into the Megacorp method of bill payment. You, a remote facility, get a bill. You assign a PO that you get from Megacorp to that bill and mail that bill, and all your other bills off to El Paso Texas. In Texas, El Paso nontheless, Megacorp has a bunch of people scan these bills into a computer. This is probably done by a much of mexican folks who come ino the US to work. El Paso is about as close to Mexico as you can get and not actually be in Mexico. Anyway, once these are scanned in, the actual bills AND the electronic copies go back to the MegaCorp headquarters in as Eastern US state, where they are then loaded into their AP system and supposedly paid, or not paid as in this case.
More closing fun. Here we are, right after month end closing and trying to run some reports. Now, with Megacorp, you do not run reports against the live Oracle database..... you run them against some copy that sits on another machine. That machine is updated regularly with the live data so the reports are current. Well, during this closing, the report database's data is 12 hours behind that of the live system. SO.... as you make an entry to the live system and want to see how it effects this or that financial report.... you have to wait up to 12 hours for the data on the report instance to be refreshed.
Now, I do not know if this is a batch thing or, if it is some constant syncing of the databases. However, to be 12 hours behind is not acceptable and is making this close nearly impossible. Whatever mechanism it is, is has fallen WAY behind and is not usually this bad. However, as people have been added to this system, these delay's have gotten worse and worse.
Recently, Megacorp added a 3rd HP Superdome to help speed their Oracle systems along but, it has not helped. For those of you who are not familiar with HP's mainframe class systems, a Superdome is a big ass purple thing as large as a 7 foot tall refrigerator and it HP's top of the line HP-UX system. It costs around $1 million.
To make matters worse, all Megacorp's sites use a single database. Most of the sites have a small fraction, AP and GL and Purchasing already in Oracle. The other functions, like order entry, work orders, AR, invoicing.. and so on.... are not implemented yet except at a single facility. There are hundreds of facilities. How slow will this thing become as facility after facility are added? What makes this even more funny, one of the companies Megacorp owns, and plans to put on this system, receives more order line items in a 1 year period than this existing system already has in it. This is just gonna get slower. I am going to buy some HP stock right now. Meagcorp is going to go broke buying Superdome's!
Well, here we are..... month end closing at Megacorp. Megacorp wants everyone to have their books closed within like 8 hours or somethinng like that. SO, within the first 8 business hours of the first day of the new month, you have to have your books all figured out. I am no accountant but, this is apparently a hard thing to do.... have all your journal entries and inventory transactions and invoicing and all done and gains/losses/sales/costs calculated within 8 hours. Luckily, Megacorp has this MASSIVE Oracle system that is supposed to help with this. However, it is no help.
As Megacorp buys up other small and unfortunate companies like ourselves, we are moved to their system and have to do some of our closing processes on their systems. Well, only part of the financials were moved to their system and all the rest, customer orders, work orders, inventory transactions, and so on are still done on our systems. There are several data files that get transferred back and forth between the two. For example, a person would order raw materials on Megacorp's system but, receive it into stock using our system. Screwed up eh? Well, it seems to work well, as long as we get an hourly file containing all the stuff that was ordered each hour. This file in imported into our system and then the stuff is received whenever it is delivered.
Well, Megacorp's system is about 8 hours behind in giving us these exports. You can't close without having all the data in place and with an 8 hour lead time before you even can start to tabulate all the data, you surely can't finish in 8 hours.