One of the largest projects I led was the launch the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system used throughout all North American plants as well as locations in France, Singapore, Mexico and China. The goals of this project included:

• Convert the system to French, but allow executives and managers to access in English
• Retain all historical data from 4 ERP systems.
• Lead teams that would review and integrate data, train their counterparts in locations around the world, and begin the process of defining best practices for various manufacturing operations throughout each facility.
• Complete the each site's deployment in no more than 5 months (per site) and with a minimal budget.

I began by assembling a team of experts from each department to act as project leaders within their area/function. Each of these leaders were responsible every element of system configuration within their area, including reviewing existing data, organization training materials and testing the ERP prior to launch.

Teams from within each site were then assembled to provide on-site support for this conversion. Key people from each site worked side-by-side with their conterparts in other parts of the organization that were already using the system. This allowed for on-the-job training of the system and direct contact to an expert who performed a similar job in another facility. The value-add to this process was an international team building that had never existed before between international plant locations.

IT programmers were also on-site during the launch process to ensure a quick response to any unforeseen system glitches.

At the time of launch, the system:

• Contained all of the historical information from the previous ERP systems.
• Resided on servers in the North American corporate office, with several redundant connections to each site.
  
• Displayed core functionality initially and allowed for advanced features to be brought on-line incrementally as appropriate.
  
• Was accessible throughout the world-wide corporate network, allowing executives to access any detail of the corporation as a whole, with the ability to drill down into a specific facility's operations.
  
• Automatically selected the appropriate time zone, language and currency based on user ID.
  

The launch was a phenomenal success. Within three months, the system helped locationa reduce delinquent orders by over 50%. It greatly improved customer response time, and give visibility to a variety of operational and profitability information that had never before been accessible directly by executives.