The Zamboanga Plant, as in the other Plants, underwent difficulties during its first day of using the new Sales and Distribution system - here I refer to as the "Cutover". Everybody had a hard time coping up - even though the changes to transactions, and procedures have been communicated long way back, people still have the difficulty in adopting new things.

Very ironic since with this Client, the benefits of the Changes are immense, and these benefits have been proven in the previous roll-out of the new S&D system. As outlined in the blog post "The Painful Road to Change" (my previous post), these new procedures totally change the way Sales, Finance and Logistics do things. As indicated in the previous roll-outs, daily transaction closing efforts and time to be spent are improved 200 to 300%.

Sales people don't have to manually issue invoices to Customers, as these are generated by the new system. Manual computations and reconciliations are already a thing in the past, as the new system fully integrates all information using simple transactions.

The first day of the new system, the Cutover, was filled with so much animosity. But in the coming few days, these indifferences will surely fade away.

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.