Without the help of the Team that my Client (let's call this client CLIENT ABC) agreed to help me out, rolling out CLIENT ABC's new Sales and Distribution system at the speed we are currently doing, would be almost impossible.

The 12 were pluck out from a selection of more than a dozen candidates, and were experts in their own fields, young, and full of energy.

After a month of bootcamp and workshop, including actual exposure to a roll-out in one of the biggest sites in Metro Manila towards the end of their training program, all passed with very satisfactory results.

We grouped them into 3 Teams, each Team assigned to a Plant and it's Sales Offices sites. Starting last July, the group have already completed 5 plants in Luzon and Visayas, and currently working on Mindanao Plants in CDO, Davao and Zamboanga, with over 12 sites to cover.

We plan to complete the Mindanao leg this December, and, Pre-work is already in place for the last 3 Plants in Leyte, Naga and Northern Luzon. Roll-Out at these sites should commence early January and completed before March, 2008.


~negosyo.ws

After 2 weeks of handholding support at my client's Cagayan de Oro (CDO) Plant-base, my team have rolled-out the new S&D system in Surigao City, about 8 to 10 hours by bus ride from Cagayan de Oro.

Also, the other group is supposed to start roll-out in another Sales Office in Butuan City (4 hours travelling by bus from CDO, or one hour air travel form Manila), however, some problems with unreconciled Sales Volume for the month of October derailed the transition.

It should take another day or two before we can fix the problem, fortunately quickly diagnosed by our Site Consultants as a bug in the records updating. They have transferred a Salesman's customers using new Sales Routes and it looked okay when looking at the Salesman's day's call schedule, however, the Customer attributes were not updated. The Sales Volume report categorizes the Sales Volume of each Salesman using the values in the Customer Profile, which gets populated upon assigning a customer to a Salesman's Sales Route.

A fix has to be done to rectify the problem. Hopefully, the Technical Team can do it in time as my Client's Head Office in Manila is consolidating all Sales Volume of all plants all over the Philippines for its incentives programs.

More to this in the coming days.


~negosyo.ws

It was 1:15pm, 45 minutes past my 12:30pm flight back to Manila from CDO and I found myself sitting in the window seat, wondering when will the plane takes off. We were informed that our flight had to wait for an indefinite time before taking off - there were reported traffic problems at the NAIA Airport Terminal in Manila. Somehow it made me think if its another system glitch that plagued the airport systems for the past 3 weeks. As always, flights get delayed or worse, canceled.

I had the comfort to extend my arms wider since nobody is occupying the middle seat of this new AIRBUS 320-200 plane of Philippine Airlines. I noticed the fair, angel looking pretty lady sitting on the aisle seat, giving me that puzzled look as well - asking if we have to wait longer.

Hmmm, problems. I left CDO with some problems resolved - too many exceptions of the new systems procedures to be documented and raised to the project Steering Committee for approval. Perhaps sitting a while longer would just be alright after all. Then came the realization that I am scheduled to take the 5:00am flight to Zamboanga, some 500 miles south of Manila the next day.

Thats trouble I'm gonna get into - no, not bombing or terrorists threats that were always associated with Zamboanga City - a rather common wrong impression about this so called 'Latin City of Asia'. The Zamboanga Plant of my client - the 10th plant to roll-out the new Sales & Distribution system, is plagued by numerous problems - mostly caused by the failure in data gathering activities.

Hmmmm, blog's getting too long. Will have to pause for a while... By the way, the plane finally took off at 2:30pm.

Today, we cutover to the new system and succesfully migrated the Client's Accounts Receivables and Sales databases. The Cagayan de Oro (CDO) Plant is the 8th Plant to roll-out the Route Sales to Delivery to Receivables system this year.

It's 10:30pm and my team is currently supporting the Users - Sales, Finance, Logistics, and even Customers in completing the necessary daily transactions.

This Plant has been doing daily reconciliations of all Sales and Finance transactions, and complete the entire task regularly at 4:00am of the next day. Reports are generated twice a week, as volume of transactions do not allow daily reporting of Sales and Receivables.

With this new system in placed, all transactions should be closed every 10:00pm, as achieved by the previous 7 plants that are already running the new system. Sales reports and Receivables can now be generated daily. Customer orders are now properly served, and delivery fill-rate should greatly increase, from the current 75-80% to 98% in about 3 weeks time.