mercury-mbs.com

1995 March - August

Thompson Minwax spun off from Eastman Kodak in 1994 to investment company Forstmann Little needed to quickly implement an ERP system to support its two plants and multiple distribution centers.  Working with Deloitte & Touche the company selected JBA System 21 as the ERP system with the caveat that it need to be implemented by June 30th 1995 so that the existing ERP running on Eastman Kodak systems could be retired by end of August. The contract was signed at the end of March and I was tasked with putting a team together to complete the phase 1 implementation of the finance, order processing, inventory management, and supply chain modules. Phase 2 would follow and would include manufacturing systems at the plants.

As the analysis began the team soon came to realize that significant modifications would be required to ensure a successful implementation. A number of the business analysts on the team had limited experience and one of the classic specifications had a series of screen shots along with the immortal words "a workfile may be required"and not much else to define a re-write of order entry.

The project plan I put together required significant overlap of the activities to meet the extremely tight deadlines and so we set up a conference room at JBA as the war room and bought key customer leads to the war room to be close to the developers in these initial releases. Then as we began to make progress we set up corresponding war room at the customer site so that the developers and analysts could work hand in hand developing and testing the modifications close to the customer. In parallel on site at Thompson Minwax the user team continued to work through the standard application training and working on data conversion and report design.

As spring moved to summer the system testing, user testing, training and data conversion went into full swing. The team migrated back and forth along almost the full length of NJ on a weekly basis.Managing change requests became a crucial part of the project management ensuring that only critical issues were addressed in the initial product release. 

July 4th came the intensity of the project reached breaking point literally with continued issues with the user acceptance testing and continual air conditioning drop outs making the working conditions almost unbearable. The first of the go live dates was postponed. The team stepped up the pace to make sure the user training was completed on time, interfaces developed and tested and final UAT was completed. Acting as solution architect, user testing lead and project manager took me to new levels in my experience on projects and made me focus on the processes of improving project delivery under very tight time lines. 

At the start of August the project went live with a number of issues still outstanding but nothing that would interrupt the business flow. The team stayed on board through August and September to see the production facilities implemented. At the end of September the project was handed over to another project team to complete the installation and follow up with additional change and modifications that had been prioritized after go live. 

My first project in the US was to help stabilize a project that was drowning in modifications and that had missed a series of go live dates as the team struggled to get a handle on the requirements.

The project was to implement the ERP system for a tile manufacture in Florida with distribution centers in Kentucky and Georgia. As part of the sales cycle a number of modifications had been promised to support RF warehousing as well a tailored order entry system. Most of the development had been completed in the UK and then installed on site with little integration testing. A team had been working on site for a number of months trying to stabilize the system and as part of a second phase i had been drafted in to help support the project.

For me there were many lessons learned from this project both as a contributor and then more significantly as I was tasked with leading the project back from the edge.

First the project went live due to pressure from the customer before the software was obviously ready and the project manager bowed to that pressure. A number of outstanding issues which seemed manageable at time and that were down played caused significant problems that bought shipments to a halt and trucks were lined up out of the plant waiting to be loaded. The team on site worked round the clock trying to fix the problems directly in production while gettign new requirements from the customer.

One of my first acts after taking over as project manager was to move all the developers into a trailer in the parking lot and create separation from the customer so we could focus on stabilization and put a hold on new requirements. The prime directive was to ensure orders were entered correctly, the right shipments went out of the door on time and were invoiced correctly. It took 4 weeks of hard labor to get the system stabilized and then the development team took to the forklifts to support and help conduct a physical stock take to allow the customer to get their business back under control.

The sense of team spirit grew as we manage to continue to get small wins and to turn the customer around. It was great to see the team keep volunteering to return to see the project through to completion and slowly we won the respect of the customer senior management and the users in general as they began to believe in the system. It really helped for the customer to see us as part of their team as we addressed not only with the system issues but helped them deal with process issues and actually helped them with their business issues. We still made a lot of mistakes as we tried to balance new requirements against fixing issues and keeping the customer  happy at all levels. We over committed certain deliverables and skipped a lot of training and process issues as we focused on the software and in hind sight a lot of those training and process issues eventually came back to haunt us.  

The project moved towards completion and we rolled out the solution to all of the distribution centers but as the team broke up and I moved on to take on new projects the customer again ran into problems and ultimately the relationship again turned sour and we lost what could have been a very successful reference account.