According to a source who wished to remain anonymous, the project also involved a third-party integrator. Without an extensive forensic analysis of the project, it's impossible to say which parties or technologies deserve blame for the project's failure.
Edwards says she's disappointed in Avon's third-quarter statement that "the pilot technology platform [in Canada] worked well, [but] the degree of impact or change in the daily processes to the Representative was significant."
"The head office kept insisting that the system was working, but it was not," Edwards says. "The sales leaders here in Canada feel that Avon is trying to portray the representatives as too stupid to use the technology."
Despite the software write off, Dever stated that "SAP continues to maintain a strong relationship with Avon," suggesting that its software is still in use.
It's Edwards' sense that Avon rushed a large-scale project into production before it was proven, and for that, Avon must take the blame. Perhaps Canada was chosen because it's a smaller market that presented less risk to the company, but the project's impact and subsequent writeoff were significant enough to require financial disclosures.
The goals of the transformation project were laudable -- what company wouldn't want better insight into inventory and a better user experience for the sales force? Avon's experience should be a cautionary tale for any enterprise developing "next-generation" functionality. Business applications are now compared to consumer applications.
"The website is complex, it is not streamlined, and they put more steps in it than are needed," Edwards says of Avon's site. "How can a Fortune 500 company like this have such a poor website design?