<story><title>Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today</title><url>https://www.ns.nl/en/travel-information/calamities/sunday-3-april-no-more-ns-trains.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ArnoVW</author><text>Have done consulting for 15 years, understand your feelings. But I&amp;#x27;d like to offer some alternative viewpoints.&lt;p&gt;Buying an off the shelve package also buys you an industry-standard business process. The idea is that part of value comes from the process that you have to shoe-horn into. Some integration is expected (and provided for) but if you have to modify heavily, You&amp;#x27;re Not Using It Correctly.&lt;p&gt;Also, using an OTS package means less development risk (not every IT dept has 10x developers coming out the wazoo) and it also means that you have a huge reservoir of skilled labour if you need it. Not just for development but also on the business side.&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you&amp;#x27;re a big, publicly owned company, you likely have many financial &amp;#x2F; reporting constraints. The scope of your non-negotiable requirements may be bigger than you imagine.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen people implement SAP in a couple of months. It&amp;#x27;s possible. It&amp;#x27;s still expensive and clunky though :-)</text></item><item><author>MetaWhirledPeas</author><text>&amp;gt; everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I&amp;#x27;d say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them.&lt;p&gt;I have a reflex repulsion for off-the-shelf &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot; software. You pay millions of dollars to subscribe to a suite of (seemingly) bad, bloated software that takes more work to customize and integrate than it would to fully replace. An army of developers trying to keep a business running with the world&amp;#x27;s largest Swiss Army knife.&lt;p&gt;My gut tells me that big names like SAP and Sales Force are easier to sell to executives, and it makes a company seem like it knows what it&amp;#x27;s doing. And maybe feeling pressure to choose a &amp;quot;respected&amp;quot; brand leads to fewer alternatives? Or maybe all the alternatives are quickly bought out by the behemoths. I really don&amp;#x27;t know. Maybe someone can enlighten me. It just seems like an enormous turd of inefficiency to me.</text></item><item><author>quartz</author><text>From the notice:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff.&lt;p&gt;...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands&amp;#x27; timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew scheduling system.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A typical workday at NS includes approximately 15,000 trips for drivers and 18,000 for conductors. The resulting number of duties is approximately 1,000 for drivers and 1,300 for conductors. This leads to extremely difficult crew scheduling instances. Nevertheless, because of the highly sophisticated applied algorithms, TURNI solves these cases in 24hours of computing time on a personal computer. Therefore, we can construct all crew schedules for all days of the week within just a few days.&lt;p&gt;Then I found more detail about TURNI&amp;#x27;s implementation in this[2] paper about optimizing crew scheduling for timetables.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In the railway industry the sizes of the crew scheduling instances are, in general, a magnitude larger than in the airline industry. Moreover, crew can be relieved during the drive of a train resulting in much more trips per duty than typical in airlines. In other words, the combinatorial explosion is much higher. The latter has made the application of these models in the railway industry prohibitive until recently.&lt;p&gt;Cool stuff.&lt;p&gt;Finally, gleaning from ns.nl&amp;#x27;s careers page[3] everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I&amp;#x27;d say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;homepages.cwi.nl&amp;#x2F;~lex&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;Interfaces.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;homepages.cwi.nl&amp;#x2F;~lex&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;Interfaces.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;repub.eur.nl&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;11701&amp;#x2F;ei200803.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;repub.eur.nl&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;11701&amp;#x2F;ei200803.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;werkenbijns.nl&amp;#x2F;werkgebieden&amp;#x2F;it&amp;#x2F;sap-specialist-bij-ns&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;werkenbijns.nl&amp;#x2F;werkgebieden&amp;#x2F;it&amp;#x2F;sap-specialist-bij-ns...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;sidenote: If anyone out there is an SAP specialist ns.nl looks like a pretty great place to work: 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension, and free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel.</text></item><item><author>miggol</author><text>My curiosity is killing me as to what exactly went wrong. And as someone living in The Netherlands I&amp;#x27;m also kind of mad at the apparent fragility of this huge chunk of our infrastructure. If this had happened on a work day, it would have been a real national emergency, rather than just a huge national inconvenience.&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate one of those post-outage &amp;quot;what happened&amp;quot; reports like with the AWS and Facebook outages last year. But outside of IT I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone really expects those over here. And there might be national security considerations preventing such disclosure until any chance of a repeat has been engineered away, at which point everyone will have forgotten.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eatingcrowe</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;ve seen people implement SAP in a couple of months. It&amp;#x27;s possible. It&amp;#x27;s still expensive and clunky though :-)&lt;p&gt;Never worked with SAP, but still coming off my burn-out hangover from $OLD_JOB - worked to migrate the nexus of the firm&amp;#x27;s accounting systems from COBOL to MS Dynamics. Unto itself, I don&amp;#x27;t really have a problem with Dynamics - I do have a problem with MS and their piss-poor available materials on the topic. While I understand their business sells training and certifications, this does ass all for folks pulled in as a pinch hitter during a death march. Can scarcely fly out to Las Vegas for a week long vacation while I&amp;#x27;m working 16 hour days to beat the clock on our last true COBOL coder&amp;#x27;s retirement date.&lt;p&gt;The greater issue I have in enterprise systems - often the consultant &amp;#x2F; contractor firms[0] involved in the process. The classic fly-out of classy sales-engineers replaced with low-rent off-shore coders for the actual work. Slick-as-shit documentation that does not match reality in even the simplest of cases. Counter-Party contacts that neither care nor hide their lack of caring for the outcome of the project. Pressing for aggressive timelines that do not meet reality&lt;p&gt;I would assume there is some correlation, however, between buying $ENTERPRISE_TOOL and an unwillingness to hold consultants feet to the fire on their own failings, structuring a contract that keeps them honest.&lt;p&gt;[0] - Not to state `ArnoVW is one, only stating a pattern I&amp;#x27;ve run into all too often.</text></comment>
<story><title>Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today</title><url>https://www.ns.nl/en/travel-information/calamities/sunday-3-april-no-more-ns-trains.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ArnoVW</author><text>Have done consulting for 15 years, understand your feelings. But I&amp;#x27;d like to offer some alternative viewpoints.&lt;p&gt;Buying an off the shelve package also buys you an industry-standard business process. The idea is that part of value comes from the process that you have to shoe-horn into. Some integration is expected (and provided for) but if you have to modify heavily, You&amp;#x27;re Not Using It Correctly.&lt;p&gt;Also, using an OTS package means less development risk (not every IT dept has 10x developers coming out the wazoo) and it also means that you have a huge reservoir of skilled labour if you need it. Not just for development but also on the business side.&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you&amp;#x27;re a big, publicly owned company, you likely have many financial &amp;#x2F; reporting constraints. The scope of your non-negotiable requirements may be bigger than you imagine.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen people implement SAP in a couple of months. It&amp;#x27;s possible. It&amp;#x27;s still expensive and clunky though :-)</text></item><item><author>MetaWhirledPeas</author><text>&amp;gt; everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I&amp;#x27;d say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them.&lt;p&gt;I have a reflex repulsion for off-the-shelf &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot; software. You pay millions of dollars to subscribe to a suite of (seemingly) bad, bloated software that takes more work to customize and integrate than it would to fully replace. An army of developers trying to keep a business running with the world&amp;#x27;s largest Swiss Army knife.&lt;p&gt;My gut tells me that big names like SAP and Sales Force are easier to sell to executives, and it makes a company seem like it knows what it&amp;#x27;s doing. And maybe feeling pressure to choose a &amp;quot;respected&amp;quot; brand leads to fewer alternatives? Or maybe all the alternatives are quickly bought out by the behemoths. I really don&amp;#x27;t know. Maybe someone can enlighten me. It just seems like an enormous turd of inefficiency to me.</text></item><item><author>quartz</author><text>From the notice:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff.&lt;p&gt;...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands&amp;#x27; timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew scheduling system.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A typical workday at NS includes approximately 15,000 trips for drivers and 18,000 for conductors. The resulting number of duties is approximately 1,000 for drivers and 1,300 for conductors. This leads to extremely difficult crew scheduling instances. Nevertheless, because of the highly sophisticated applied algorithms, TURNI solves these cases in 24hours of computing time on a personal computer. Therefore, we can construct all crew schedules for all days of the week within just a few days.&lt;p&gt;Then I found more detail about TURNI&amp;#x27;s implementation in this[2] paper about optimizing crew scheduling for timetables.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In the railway industry the sizes of the crew scheduling instances are, in general, a magnitude larger than in the airline industry. Moreover, crew can be relieved during the drive of a train resulting in much more trips per duty than typical in airlines. In other words, the combinatorial explosion is much higher. The latter has made the application of these models in the railway industry prohibitive until recently.&lt;p&gt;Cool stuff.&lt;p&gt;Finally, gleaning from ns.nl&amp;#x27;s careers page[3] everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I&amp;#x27;d say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;homepages.cwi.nl&amp;#x2F;~lex&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;Interfaces.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;homepages.cwi.nl&amp;#x2F;~lex&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;Interfaces.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;repub.eur.nl&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;11701&amp;#x2F;ei200803.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;repub.eur.nl&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;11701&amp;#x2F;ei200803.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;werkenbijns.nl&amp;#x2F;werkgebieden&amp;#x2F;it&amp;#x2F;sap-specialist-bij-ns&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;werkenbijns.nl&amp;#x2F;werkgebieden&amp;#x2F;it&amp;#x2F;sap-specialist-bij-ns...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;sidenote: If anyone out there is an SAP specialist ns.nl looks like a pretty great place to work: 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension, and free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel.</text></item><item><author>miggol</author><text>My curiosity is killing me as to what exactly went wrong. And as someone living in The Netherlands I&amp;#x27;m also kind of mad at the apparent fragility of this huge chunk of our infrastructure. If this had happened on a work day, it would have been a real national emergency, rather than just a huge national inconvenience.&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate one of those post-outage &amp;quot;what happened&amp;quot; reports like with the AWS and Facebook outages last year. But outside of IT I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone really expects those over here. And there might be national security considerations preventing such disclosure until any chance of a repeat has been engineered away, at which point everyone will have forgotten.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PennRobotics</author><text>You see, when your Foxpro guy retires in 10 years, either you&amp;#x27;ve been training  your new hires how to program Foxpro (a waste of time) or you&amp;#x27;ll pay a specialist to move all your business data and operation macros to a new platform (a waste of money).&lt;p&gt;SAP lets you stop kicking that can down the road by wasting your time and money today.</text></comment>