ERP Implementation Lessons

摘要

This case study describes lessons learned from the ERP implementation at a leading metal container products company. It is a $200 million, 53-year-old company, headquartered in the United States, with facilities in multiple states and in Europe. It is a leading producer for the wholesale, retail, OEM, and industrial markets. The company was in the midst of a successful turnaround during the project, which was initiated primarily to deal with the Y2K problem, as a new management team provided new direction. During the project, the company was also transitioning to focus factory management, flow manufacturing, product rationalization, and reorganizing business units, all this in the midst of a major facilities consolidation. In spite of all this, the project was probably in the top 10 percent of ERP efforts. There was a constant personnel shortage and competition for mindshare. Due to inevitable time and resource constraints, the phase I implementation consisted only of replacing legacy systems and the most urgent partial reengineering of at-risk processes. The company was successful in transitioning to the improved system and initiating follow-on process reengineering. Currently (mid-1999), system implementation in other North American and European sites is underway. The founders sold the firm in 1996 to the present owners, who faced a number of challenges to bring the company up to their expectations: 1. need for more emphasis on quality 2. debt load to service initially inhibited capital appropriations 3. difficult facilities consolidation project 4. aging, obsolete, and unresponsive business systems with a Y2K problem 5. product development 6. competition. In that context, the company was attempting to modernize, rightsize, and streamline for the future, but nearly lost the race with time. About six years ago, the company engaged a major consulting firm to study major improvement opportunities. One of the chief recommendations was to upgrade ERP systems, but due to many other priorities, the company only started moving on the recommendations in mid-1997, with a looming Y2K deadline. Therefore, schedule and implementation priorities were somewhat mandated by the situation. The owners brought in new management in the summer of 1998, and they began building their new team of high-quality professionals, including key valued members of the existing team. Fortunately, the former management had the presence of mind to initiate the ERP project and to staff it with mostly excellent people. The new management's major initial challenges and priorities involved dealing with a difficult plant consolidation, product shortages, customer issues, and that little Y2K ERP problem also. The unresponsive business systems weren't solely attributable to ancient software. There were also data integrity problems in inventory, purchasing, and production. Practices and procedures were in need of updating. Much training was needed. Existing systems tools were not even fully implemented. There were philosophical differences between the way the business was run and how the systems were designed to work, not an atypical situation in many companies.