Case Study: Project & Recovery Risk

CHALLENGE.

A global manufacturing company hired us to lead the identification, management and mitigation of business-critical gaps just prior to a planned big bang go live for a multi-year, SAP systems consolidation effort with TCO reduction as its primary goal.

Once on board, it was soon clear that the project team lacked the experience necessary to successfully plan and execute something of this size, scope and complexity. Our assessment of the project was as follows:

  • No project SDLC methodology defined

  • Poor-to-no requirements were documented or traced through the SDLC

  • Limited quality controls and testing standards existed

  • Minimal understanding or visibility to risk among the team

  • Poorly defined communication protocols

To make things more challenging, the go live was to be done remotely due to COVID-19 lockdowns and we never had an opportunity to visit the plants and see the operations we were impacting.

In our view, the project was not ready for go live and posed a threat to business continuity and to customers if allowed to proceed as planned. Recommendations to delay were denied and, at the same time, a force majeure was declared in Europe – severely stressing the company’s people, processes and technology, creating a very complex situation to manage.

SOLUTION.

To address the problems at hand, we introduced and applied expert agile business analysis and project delivery techniques to improve project quality, ease communications and speed delivery.

We developed and maintained the company’s first documented Business Process Model & Requirements Trace Matrix in order to control quality and begin reducing TCO.

We created, maintained and reported MS Project plans based on best practice planning and management.

We worked with the team to elicit and document approximately 200 unique, business-critical order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and demand-to-ship functional requirements and traced each one through all phases of the SDLC – including design, development, testing, cutover and production maintenance.

We configured SAP ECC 6.0 and led RICEF development for all of the following:

  • Domestic, export and EU Intracommunity order-to-cash

  • Domestic and foreign Intercompany sales and procurement

  • Available-to-promise and order confirmations

  • Order management, rescheduling and reporting

  • European foreign trade and compliance

  • European value-added tax (VAT)

  • Integrated European freight forwarding

  • Customer and logistics EDI integrations

We devised work arounds to manage through incomplete areas following go live and through the hyper-care phase.

IMPACT.

Unfortunately, the impact of the poorly planned go live was significant – leaving many customers, employees and vendors in a persistent state of upheaval. Work-arounds provided some relief, but costs mounted quickly.

The force majeure declared shortly following go live significantly intensified the urgency to gain control over sales and operational planning issues after customers began threatening legal action as a consequence of missed confirmations and breaches of contract.

Working remotely was a silver lining that allowed our small team to be as efficient and effective as possible – creating an agile working environment for quick and accurate design, development, testing and deployment of all missing requirements.

Operational stability was declared after 18-months of intensive hypercare ,during which we successfully elicited, documented, designed, developed, validated and deployed all requirements and solutions through several agile sprints.