Stefan Mileschin

The US Air Force has admitted that it wasted more than a billion dollars on a decade long ERP project that has never worked.

After wasting all that cash, they worked out that project would cost far too much more money for too little gain. One would have though that they would have sorted out those sorts of problems in the planning stage.

According to Computerworld, the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) has cost the Airforce $1.03 billion in costs since 2005, and has not yielded any significant military capability.

An Air Force spokesman said that it would cost an additional $1.1B for about a quarter of the original scope to continue and would not be ready until 2020.

Not surprisingly the Air Force has worked out that the ECSS program is no longer a viable option for meeting the FY17 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirement. Instead it will cancel the project and thing about something nice instead.

The programme has been restructured three times within the past three years, and finally hit on the wizard idea that the whole thing was better off forgotten about.

The project started in 2005, when Oracle won an $88.5 million software contract, beating SAP and other vendors.

It seemed a good idea at the time. It was to replace more than 200 legacy systems.

Michael Krigsman, CEO of consulting firm Asuret and an expert on IT project failures wondered why it took the Airforce a billion dollars and ten years to realise that the project was pants.

He also questioned how the Air Force would get itself auditable books, which was the goal of the project.

The tinfoil hat theory is that the Airforce does not want its books to be audited by 2017 or at any time in the future. If it does, then people will see how much the whole thing costs them.

http://news.techeye.net/hardware/us-...on-erp-project