Let the whole process crash and burn. Make sure it's clear this happened because of bad communications and/or unauthorised actions of this person. Also make sure you can't be implicated
The whole thing did crash and burn for several hours. Unfortunately, if we don't get it back online, 150 people have no work, and thus, no job. All of this because one consultant thinks she has a lot more authority than she actually does, and was just the wrong fucking pick for the job. The same person also made a change that she was specifically told not to make (as there had been no testing), and did so in such a way that it cannot now be un-done without shutting the system down for several hours to repair her stupid fucking code, which she has wrapped up in so many other pieces of code that the damage would radiate out like ripples on a pond, which caused me to spend 5.5 hours today just cleaning up her fucking mess by deactivating erroneously created part numbers; all because she's too lazy to find a data entry clerk (we have several within the company who are always looking for something to do), and have that person manually type in about 2 hours' worth of data entry.
It's also the same person who argued and argued and argued that we shouldn't do a full physical inventory (for a fucking manufacturing company) before we imported all of our inventory from the old system to the new one back in October, even though we knew the info in the old system was wrong, because we could "just cycle count" one item category a week until it was right. Well, now we can't fucking do an inventory even though we know that the inventory in our new system is completely wrong, because she can't find all of the parts that are auto-flushing out of the system from production orders we processed back in fucking October, and get them to stop long enough to get everything counted and entered back in.
Or, how about the fact that she's the person who decided (extremely erroneously, in everyone else in the company's minds) that we should tailor our processes to fit the $1M piece of software we'd just purchased, instead of getting the software developer to tailor the software to us, because "the biggest companies in your field don't do it the way you've been doing it, you're just used to doing it this wrong and stupid way for so long it seems right to you." Bitch,
we are the biggest fucking company in our industry west of the fucking Mississippi. If our competitors aren't smart enough to do things the same way as us, that's on them. But I do not intend to reduce my effectiveness and the efficiency of my shop to meet the standards of a bunch of little podunk companies with net worths less than a third of our company's, just because you come from the widget manufacturing world and don't fucking understand how highly-customized light manufacturing works. Oh, and those completely stupid things we used to do? Yeah... Allocating materials to specific projects. I can't just pick up the phone and guarantee that I'm going to be able to get all of the material I need for any given phase of a project overnight. How do I know if the 80 sheets of laminate that the system says we have in stock are for project a or project h? "It doesn't matter as long as you have enough for each day's production." Well, how am I supposed to know which day's production this material is being used for? "I'll get back to you on that." Costing materials by specific project. How do I know which projects I'm making a profit on (none of them) and which ones I'm losing money on (all of them), if I purchase materials at one cost (current cost) and issue them out at another (standard cost)? "Oh, that's not the way companies do things anymore. Every successful company in the world runs on standard costs."
Our company has been hemorrhaging money for the past 5 god damn months from everything from overnighting 4x8 sheets of laminate from North fucking Carolina to having to remake every single cabinet on a job 4 times before they were done correctly, to buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of the wrong stuff. And the only reason that anyone at the company still has a job is because the owners of the company are partners in an investment firm with more cash than god damn brains, and haven't been able to offload the company yet because no one wants to buy a company that's hemorrhaging money. Now, we can't put all of the blame on this one person, because she had basically no fucking oversight during the entire dev cycle on this software, and ownership failed to listen to the people that they should have been listening to way back in the beginning of the transition, before it was too damn late. They let her run the show, up to and including hiring her own team of outside consultants, one of whom was supposed to be a SQL genius who couldn't figure out a fucking JOIN statement and the other of whom showed up once or twice a week and kept the sharepoint site that only he had access to up to date.
If the current owners really are looking to turn this around right-quick so they can sell, I'm taking a percentage of the proceeds and getting the fuck out of Dodge. As much as I really did love my job (before all this new-system bullshit started), and as much as I really do enjoy 98.5% of my co-workers; this place has fucking used me up and I need out of the office world. I need to go make physical things with my hands and be creative for a while.