Oh yes, the white elephant that is 'Works Manager' is still here causing havoc and mayhem !!!
From my failing memory, I think it came into being in the early 90's when we had the hand- held 'Husky' units for picking up work. Again from memory, I believe the figure it cost to introduce the system was in the mid- twenties (Millions£), which is minuscule compared to what it has cost since to manually manipulate the system, due to its incredible faux-pas.
I think the poster above (johnnyteg), may be getting confused with the recent roll-out of 'Work Manager 2', and the introduction of 'Model Office'as to the vast ammountsb of travel we are currently enduring.
As a triallist of 'Model Office' on the WM 1 machine, I can assureJohnnyteg that it is MO that is the cause of the issue, not the WM2. WM2 (as with WM1), just issues jobs as it sees fit which usually entails travelling to other far reaching areas, previously manual intervention has stopped this, but with MO the 'Contollers' are told to leave well alone from manual intervention and allow WM to run things automatically. Discipline awaits any deviance from these rules, barring obvious instances such a health and safety issue.
Just for clarity purpose.
PS ... Welcome Jteg and I'm a JDSU man myself.