| I tried to provide detailed, bullet-point answers to that question, in the initial post, and the general comment on difficulty of automating seemingly discrete and simple business processes. I don't have much additional information, but perhaps to summarize: * Initial iteration of system is (by definition) imperfect * People who are supposed to maintain constraints and parameters, don't * Person who typically does end up maintaining the system is not aware of all constraints and parameters, and doesn't have power or channel to change system * Process for noting and updating constraints is poorly communicated and not enforced * Through entropy, system, which was not perfect in the first place, gets worse over time, which feedback loops because people keep overriding it and updating it less and less. My friends'/family experience has been that when a new HR Manager joins a store, they tend to "clean up" everything as much as they can; but then entropy sinks in again - people don't update constraints and requirements, system deteriorates, and provides more reason/excuses for people to not use it properly. ------------ On aside, in my own daily life, I've been working on ERP systems all my life, and as a techie it's a fascinating place to be. I assumed that numbers are numbers, business processes are well structured, defined and documented, and that people who's job it is to use a specific system will be at least somewhat proficient in that system. None of those things are necessarily broadly true :). On aside-aside, similar thing can be observed in MS Project btw. MS Project has an incredibly powerful scheduling engine. It's amazing! But! 99% of MS Project users don't know how to use MS Project. They try to use it as Excel. They type in some tasks, the dates aren't what they want them to be, then they override automatic scheduling by putting manual dates rather than putting constraints into the system... and the negative feedback loop commences. I've rarely seen a MS Project Plan file which properly uses the scheduling engine :-/ |