"Very little assistance from the vendor" was forthcoming when it came to database tuning, Judge says, so Children's ended up dedicating a database administrator to the PeopleSoft application for an extended period after the launch. Judge cited one payroll report that took 12 hours to complete before tuning. Since then the DBA and Judge's team have been able to cut report generation down to 90 minutes. Judge stresses that you can never have enough DBA talent for a project of this scope.
The app dev team had its own set of challenges. As far as Children's could determine, this project was the largest and most complex ERP rollout any medical facility had ever undertaken. During the planning phases, Children's could not find another hospital that had replaced all its core business applications simultaneously, making it difficult to predict the true scope of the project. And to add to the uncertainty, Children's was using PeopleSoft's first Web-based client release. Predictably, the implementation was buggy.
"Patches were coming out almost weekly," says Cohen. "We could not stop development to upgrade." In lieu of patches, they were forced to create workarounds. They performed patch management by hand, developer by developer. With so many application modules going live at the same time, tracking patches was difficult. (If you find yourself in patching hell, see "PatchLink Helps Keep Windows Closed.")
When Children's froze the code for the new application pre-launch, it fell so far behind in applying patches and bug fixes that PeopleSoft threatened to stop supporting the code. Ultimately, though, "the teams and personalities worked well together," Cohen says, and the code was stabilized in time for the April go-live date.
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