Asda IT Staff Shuffled Off To TCS Amid Messy Tech Divorce From Walmart (theregister.com) 22
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Asda is transferring more than 100 internal IT workers to Indian outsourcing company TCS as it labors to meet deadlines to move away from IT systems supported by previous owner Walmart by the end of the year. According to documents seen by The Register, a collective consultation for a staff transfer under TUPE -- an arrangement by which employment rights are protected under UK law -- begins today (June 17). The UK's third-largest supermarket expects affected staff to meet line managers from June 24, while the transfer date is set for September 16. Contractors will be let go at the end of their current contracts. Asda employs around 5,000 staff in its UK offices. Between 130 and 135 members of the IT team have entered the collective consultation to move to TCS.
The move came as private equity company TDR Capital gained majority ownership of the supermarket group. It was acquired from Walmart by the brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa and TDR Capital in February 2021 at a value of 6.8 billion pounds. The US retail giant retained "an equity investment." Project Future is a massive shift in the retailer's IT function. It is upgrading a legacy ERP system from SAP ECC -- run on-prem by Walmart -- to the latest SAP S/4HANA in the Microsoft Azure cloud, changing the application software, infrastructure, and business processes at the same time. Other applications are also set to move to Azure, including ecommerce and store systems, while Asda is creating an IT security team for the first time -- the work had previously been carried out by its US owner.
Asda signed up to SAP's "RISE" program in a deal to lift, shift, and transform its ERP system -- a vital plank in the German vendor's strategy to get customers to the cloud -- in December 2021. But the project has already been beset by delays. The UK retailer had signed a three-year deal with Walmart in February 2021 to continue to support its existing system, but was forced to renegotiate to extend the arrangement, saying it planned to move away from the legacy systems before the end of 2024. Although one insider told El Reg that deadline was "totally unachievable," the Walmart deal extends to September 2025, giving the UK retailer room to accommodate further delays without renegotiating the contract.
Asda has yet to migrate a single store to the new infrastructure. The first -- Yorkshire's Otley -- is set to go live by the end of June. One insider pointed out that project managers were trying to book resources from the infrastructure team for later this year and into the next, but, as they were set to transfer to TCS, the infrastructure team did not know who would be doing the work or what resources would be available. "They have a thousand stores to migrate and they're going to be doing that with an infrastructure team who have their eyes on the door. They'll be very professional, but they're not going above and beyond and doing on-call they don't have to do," the insider said.
The move came as private equity company TDR Capital gained majority ownership of the supermarket group. It was acquired from Walmart by the brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa and TDR Capital in February 2021 at a value of 6.8 billion pounds. The US retail giant retained "an equity investment." Project Future is a massive shift in the retailer's IT function. It is upgrading a legacy ERP system from SAP ECC -- run on-prem by Walmart -- to the latest SAP S/4HANA in the Microsoft Azure cloud, changing the application software, infrastructure, and business processes at the same time. Other applications are also set to move to Azure, including ecommerce and store systems, while Asda is creating an IT security team for the first time -- the work had previously been carried out by its US owner.
Asda signed up to SAP's "RISE" program in a deal to lift, shift, and transform its ERP system -- a vital plank in the German vendor's strategy to get customers to the cloud -- in December 2021. But the project has already been beset by delays. The UK retailer had signed a three-year deal with Walmart in February 2021 to continue to support its existing system, but was forced to renegotiate to extend the arrangement, saying it planned to move away from the legacy systems before the end of 2024. Although one insider told El Reg that deadline was "totally unachievable," the Walmart deal extends to September 2025, giving the UK retailer room to accommodate further delays without renegotiating the contract.
Asda has yet to migrate a single store to the new infrastructure. The first -- Yorkshire's Otley -- is set to go live by the end of June. One insider pointed out that project managers were trying to book resources from the infrastructure team for later this year and into the next, but, as they were set to transfer to TCS, the infrastructure team did not know who would be doing the work or what resources would be available. "They have a thousand stores to migrate and they're going to be doing that with an infrastructure team who have their eyes on the door. They'll be very professional, but they're not going above and beyond and doing on-call they don't have to do," the insider said.
First Post Didn't Read The Article (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are broadly correct.
1. Walmart sells Asda to an "interesting" pair
2. Asda needs to migrate from Walmart ERP to their new ERP
3. Blah, blah SAP HANA
4. ERP migration is delayed
5. Enter Tata Consultancy Services (so awful that even Wipro people laugh at 'em)
6. TUPE applies, but who wants to work for TCS?!
Re: (Score:1)
I've been TUPE'ed - I'm pretty sure no one gets any sort of choice, or any sort of say in it. The best you can hope for is that you're overpaid for your job title, then at least the 'receiving' party will look to get you out by paying you off.
For anyone not familiar, TUPE is a way to 'transfer' your employees to another company. All the employee's salary, holidays, work history/tenure etc are all transferred. The employee "won't notice" as such, they just carry on working and keep getting paid exactly as th
Re: (Score:2)
Informative, thanks for posting that.
Re: (Score:2)
> TCS
If TCS are involved then TUPE is going to be one of the worst outcomes.
If possible, take redundancy as there won't be much of a company left to work with.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you. Gibberish is best understood only by Gibberians, who like on the island of Gibber.
Re: (Score:1)
JIRA is the same thing just a huge waste of money with consultants spouting JIRA buzzwords.
Citation needed.
Re: (Score:1)
I can't believe people are apologizing for Jira.
I've met like 2 project managers who actually did their job but somehow they need every feature in jira.
The software itself is ok but nobody should be allowed to use it.
Re: (Score:2)
I can't believe people are apologizing for Jira.
Jira is a piece of software. Some people live with it, some people like it and some people do not.
I live with it but this does not make me an apologist.
somehow they need every feature in jira
I have never met a Scrum Master or Product Manager that uses every Jira feature. That would be strange.
For Kanban and it's integration with Confluence, GitHub and PagerDuty, Jira is OK. It may not be OK for you.
The software itself is ok but nobody should be allowed to use it.
Citation needed.
Re: (Score:1)
If I ask the PM who the other stakeholders are and he shrugs he loses any right to block me from moving his 1 sentence stories to done without getting blocked by some state machine spaghetti.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
In my experience, when SAP and HANA are mentioned, companies are going to pay big, big bucks
My rule of thumb is when a company is putting in SAP, Cpt 11 is not far behind, unless the company is huge. Maybe Walmart is big enough to survive this. Will see in 5 to 10 years.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe Walmart is big enough to survive this.
Asda are migrating to a new ERP system and leaving the Walmart ERP system behind.
Consequently, maybe Asda is big enough to survive this.
Re:SAP and HANA mentioned... enough said... (Score:4, Interesting)
ASDA, not Walmart.
And ASDA is plenty large enough. 145,000 employees and well north of 1000 supermarkets across the UK. Its a monster sized company by any measure.
So yeah, it kind of is the soft of organization where you might contemplate not setting the dogs on the SAP rep who turns up, as supermarket chains have stupidly complicated supply chains and need something with a bit more grunt than a jerry rigged instance of Oodoo living in a docker container on the office synology nas.
Re: (Score:3)
The Oodoo instance on a Docker container on an x86 Synology NAS hits close to home. Although in my case, it is running on a QNAP NAS that is not running the QNAP firmware, but plain Ubuntu, so the NAS can use ZFS.
This makes me wonder what Walmart and other grocery chains run these days for keeping all their supply lines in check. I remember in antediluvian times, Walmart used AIX and applications on that, but that is ancient history.
Changing everything at once (Score:3)
In the second, the project was abandoned after several years. One big hurdle is no one seems to be able to figure out exactly what the system does and how it does it; so they write some general specs and wind up in fights with the implementation company over who fault it is when things go south. As - Is processes are poorly documented because no one wants to spend the money and take the time to really do it right. In the second project, I reviewed there were no As-Is diagrams, just To-Be's, some of which didn't work if you walked through them on paper. Of course, no one willing to admit that because then they'd have to explain why the paid some consulting firm millions to do the process flows. In both cases, a rush to meet some unreasonable deadline resulted in a giant mess.
I also did some work with a company that was moving and laying off all the local staff and hiring new staff at the new one. They wanted the old staff to train the new ones. You can guess how well that went.
I'm not familiar with UK employment law, but might it not be best to take a package and then see if the consulting firm wanted to hire you; figuring after the project you're likely to be made redundant anyway? In my experience with those big outsourcing firms, they are just looking for the cheapest possible labor and UK employees are likely not to be that.
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect a lot of the Asda IT staff will hold their noses and stay with TCS, the job market in the UK is pretty crap unless you have some sought after skills. However after having dealt with TCS in my professional life, I can tell that this whole process is screwed from the beginning. TCS are one of the cheapest outsourcers and they just do almost everything in the cheapest low effort manner.
Good luck to all involved.
hahahahaha SAP (Score:3)
Asda signed up to SAP's "RISE" program in a deal to lift, shift, and transform its ERP system
Poor doomed fuckers. SAP is what the customers are.
I feel for the pepole who have to work on this... (Score:2)
From what I understand, SAP is a truly horrid piece of software to work with (up there with the likes of Lotus Notes). Although I don't think there is an ERP solution on the planet that is actually GOOD.
Re: (Score:2)
Gooooooood luck. (Score:2)