Atos Origin
[Atos Origin] was formed in October 2000 following a merger between the French company Atos and Origin B.V. from the Netherlands. Prior to that, both companies were the creation of other smaller mergers and acquisitions starting from around 1976. In 1996, Origin B.V. was created after a merger of the Dutch company BSO and the Philips C&P (Communications & Processing) division, while a year later in 1997, Atos was created following a merger of the French companies Axime and Sligos. During my time at Origin in the US I worked on projects for:
- Solar Turbines,
- British Steel,
- Philips Electronics,
- Neways,
- Flextronics,
- APW,
- Crown
The major project implementations and detailed below.
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Philips Components 1997-1998
In 1997 I transferred from Sinagpore to the Origin Consultancy practice in North America. The first project undertaken in the US was for Philips Components in Santa Clara CA and El Paso TX. The objective of the Project was to implement Baan in the El Paso Warehouses and at the Finance and Administration center in Santa Clara. Being a large distribution center the key success factors were interfacing Baan successfully with a bar-code scanning system and ensure rapid put away and retrival of products using Cross-Docking, Golden Zone location control and Wave picking warehouse management techniques. A secondary success factor was implementing Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and GL and interfacing it with Philips general accounting system hosted by SAP. The project was completed in eight months.
Implementation Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 5
- Project Budget: Approximately US3million
- Project Length: 8 Months
Neways, Provo Utah 1998-1999
Established in 1992 in Salem, Utah, Neways creates, manufactures, and distributes an extensive line of personal care products, nutritional supplements, and household products. Similar to its more famous counterparts like Avon and Amway, its products are sold through distributors.
When I led a Baan ERP implemetation during the fall of 1998, Neways was going through a very rapid period of growth. It was a family owned business generating a lot of cash and profits through its distribution channels that had reached many countries. Whereas money to spent on IT projects was plentiful, Neways was still lacking many of the usual business and manufacturing practices. Our main objective in the first phase was implement the basic Baan modules and manage and reduce the high level of raw material and finished goods inventory in the warehouse. We also implemented the basic AR, AP and GL modules. For this project I pulled together a team of five full time consultants including myself and brought other consultants in to work on ad-hoc project tasks as needed.
By April 2009 the first phase was completed as scheduled and we began work on phase 2, which was to roll out the project to its Wellington, New Zealand facility and interface Baan with a bespoke credit card sales program written by a third party programmer. The second phase was less successful insofar as that although we were able to implement the Baan sales module features successfully, the third-party credit card application was designed with too many flaws and eventually abandoned by Neways.
Project Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 8 including part-time consultants
- Project Budget:US$4million
- Length of Project:11 months.
Flextronics, San Jose 2000
[Flextronics] is one of the world largest Electronic Manufacturing Service (EMS) companies in the world. They design and manufacture many of the branded electronic devices on sale world wide. Flextronics were located figuratively and literally in the heart of the Silicon Valley boom of the middle to late 1990's. They were growing rapidly both organically and by acquisition and by the time I had first been introduced to them they already had 40 facilities in California and elsewhere.
The CEO, Michael Marks had decided that a single ERP system should be implemented across Flextronics for cost and logistical reasons. When I first worked on a Flextronics implementation, Baan had all ready be implemented in many of the facilities in San Jose. Their first implemenation had taken one year and many millions of dollars. At this rate it would take 40 years to implement just the facilities currently owned by Flextronics and bankrupt the company in the meantime. It was decided that all future implementations take 8-12 weeks and following a strict non-customized roll-out schedule. My initial role was to design and implement a web-based training system to roll out to the sites as a part of a continuous training initiative.
Training Application
In 2001 I supervised a internal and consultancy team that developed and interactive web-based training portal. The material took over eight weeks before handing over to Flextronics for deployment. The objective was to train employees new to IFS as part of their implementation roll out. The training consisted of slides, exercises and questions. Employees who signed on were logged along side their scores. Extra training material was provided to those employees who scored poorly. Later in 2001 I demonstrated the web-based training system at the Baan World User Conference in Quebec City.
Project Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 1
- Project Budget: US$75,000
- Length of Project: 10 weeks.
Flextronics, Portsmouth, New Hampshire 2000
Continuing its stategy of implementing a single ERP across all sites, Flextronics had recently purchased a new business in Portsmouth, New Hampsire. Currently, this facility was using SAP and our objective was to migrate them off SAP and retrain the staff on Baan. On the positive side, the users were well trained users of an ERP system however migrating and retraining the users was more difficult. For instance, in SAP there were perhaps 25 MRP codes but in Baan there were less than half that amount. There was amongst the users a feeling that by migrating to Baan they were losing functionality. We had to strictly abide to the 8 weeks implementation schedule plus two weeks post-implementation support. The other challengs included migrating the data, implementing EDI and designing all the bar-coded printer labels for all the products. For this I retained 3 consultants that I worked with on previous projects to focus on application training and to further technical consultants to work on EDI, Bar-coding and migration. In addition, the internal project manager, who was an ex-consultant took on many project management roles I would normally undertake, which allowed me to focus more on the Finance training.
In essence this was very much a square peg in a round hole with hammer implementation, which nonetheless was completed on time and on budget. Shortly afterwards, Flextronics decided that given that they were acquiring so many facilities it would no longer dictate conversion to Baan if they already possessed a strong ERP application.
Project Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 5
- Budget: Approximately US$1million
- Length of Project: 12 weeks
APW Enclosures
In the late 1990's Baan was vying with JD Edwards as the 2nd biggest selling ERP application in the world. During the implementation at Flextronics it came to light that Baan had indulged in suspect accounting practices and the share price plummeted from US$70 per share to below US$1. Almost overnight the Baan company disappeared and the Origin practice cast around for another ERP application to consulat in. At around the same time a Scandanavian ERP applicaton called [IFS] was trying to break in the US Market and was looking for consulting partners to help implement their product in the North American region.
I moved to Origin's new IFS practice and my first role was as project manager for a 20 site roll out at Waukeshaw-based contract manufacturer called APW. The first phase of the project was conducting a readiness assessment at all the sites. Called Race to Readiness we developed implementation readiness asessment to determine each site's ability to absorb an IFS implementation, the estimated length of the implementation as well as the order in which all sites would be implemented. Ironically, one of the first sites visited in Radford, VA was already using Baan and I had a similar experience to that of Flextronics of persuading users to migrate off a fully functional ERP system to one with less functionality.
After the Race to Readiness assessment was completed I undertook the role of Project Manager at one of their largest facilities in Champlin, Minnesota. I managed team that included one Atos Origin consultant and two IFS consultants. IFS promised a fully functioning migration toolkit. Much as I had experienced at Philips, the toolkit was practically useless and I eskewed this phase of he project and decided to work directly with the client's Data Base Administator to write a program to migrate the data straight ot IFS. For this reason and because I did not work for IFS, I was treated with much skepticism and a little hostility by the IFS consultants and one of my biggest challenges was keeping them on-side and maintaining a united front to the client. This made the implementation much harder than it should have been, yet I stuck I stuck to my guns even when the IFS consultants tried to go over my head to the IFS global project manager. The best response to their antics was to stick to the implementation timetable and budget and get APW live as planned. The rest of the implementations taking place across the company did not fare as well as other roll outs ran in to trouble. Only one or two other sites went live and financial problems at APW forced the company to slow down its implementation schedule before eventaully sliding into bankruptcy.
Project Summary
- Role:Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 3
- Budget: Approximately US$3million
- Length of Project: 14 weeks.
Waddington, North America 2001-2003
As the APW implementation was winding down I was asked to provide responses to RFI questionnaire from a potential client called WNA. A few weeks later I was asked by IFS to take over the per-sales engagement and develop a high-level project plan and quote to implement their four sites. My recommendation was a 4 month consultancy project engagement costing US$1.2million. IFS and WNA rejected the cost and length as too high. I was asked to resubmit a new quote and even with the most optimistic scenario I could only get the quote down to $1million. IFS responded by taking over the project and quoting US$800,000 and the WNA signed off on the project.
Six months later no progess had been made and I was asked by IFS to take the role as Distribution consultant on the project. Nonetheless, it was the IFS Project Manager who was skeptical suggesting that I may be disgruntled having been passed over and seek to undermime the project. Being Distribution consultant did not initially occupy much time on the project and after the project manager was fired from the project I took over the Finance consultant role also. It was not until April 2003 that WNA went live at their first two sites. The project was now seriously late and over budget. The CFO responded by firing his IT Director and IFS and asked me to take over as IFS Project Manager for WNA as the new IT Director. For further information on this project when i joined WNA see the article IFS Implementation
