Philips Electronics
PCC Philips Consumer Communications
[Philips Electronics] is one of the largest and diversse electronic companies in the world, employing over 100,000 world wide. Headquartered in Amsterdam Philips manufacturing divisions include Comsumer Electronics such as TV's, phones. Personal Heathcare, Lighting, Medical Systems.
I joined Philips consulting division, called Origin. I had accepted the job without really understanding what my role would be beyond implmenting Baan ERP. I had expected upon my arrival in Singapore that over time this would become apparent. I was mistaken. On my first day full day in the country I was met by my manager outside the company provided apartment and was walked over to the Philips Consumer Electronics Factory in Toa Payoh. I was briefed for 10 minutes and told that I was about to go in to a meeting with the Philips Consumer Communications (PCC) Manager alongside Coopers and Lybrand and pitch a Baan implementation project.
Complete naivety was my savior as if I knew the true enormity of what I was letting myself in for I would have thrown in the towel right there. I made it through the meeting and although there was some degree of scepticism of my experience, I had at least demonstrated a track record of successfully implementing Baan, which the Copper's could not. I found my way to the downtown office of Origin got on the phone and began hiring implementation consultants from Taiwan, India and Hong Kong.
PCC was a new division at Philips set up to manufacture mobile phones. Philips is noted for innovation if not marketing had designed a revolutionary, small voice-activated mobile phone called the Roadrunner. Baan was chosen for its strong Configuration module and was being implemented at all the new PCC manuafcturing sites in Europe and South East Asia. Taking a cue from the Roadrunner name the global implementation manager in Le Mans, France called the Baan Implementation Project Coyote. It was not a good omen. Someone should have told him the Coyote never catches the Roadrunner.
I took my team to Le Mans outside Paris, France where the project had already started, to learn the implementaion methodology and take it back to Singapore. The project was in a mess but we learned enough there to know that I was not going to replicate it in Singapore. This played well with the PCC Manager in Singapore who was also critical of the bureacracy and inertia that had built up in Le Mans and we knew that we had just 12 weeks until manufacturing was due to begin at the Singapore site.
The first major decision I had to take was data migration to the Singapore servers. I was presented with a costly and lengthly ETL quote from the techical team in Le Mans. I opted to merely take a tape back up back to Singapore. This was risky decision but knowing Baan as well as I knew it within a week of loading it on the servers I stripped the entire database of the data transactions and tweaked the configuraion where necessary and we were ready to deploy on time. After being audited by the internal Philips auditors the implementation was awarded a citation as one of the most successful IT project at Philips 1996.
After implementing in Singapore we rolled out to the PCC sites in Hong Kong and Australia and then back to Singapore to implement Baan in other wireless product line divisions.
Implementation Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Number of Consultants directly reporting: 4
- Budget: Approx US$6million
- Number of Sites Implemented:4
Other Implementation Projects
During my time based in Singapore I also project managed implementations at Trox Air-condition, Malayasian Wire and Steel, and SMP Microprocessors in Malaysia. I was also involved in smaller assignments at Philips, London, UK and in Eindhoven.
