I mentioned in my previous posts that my team is now currently rolling-out the last 3 plants with a total of 16 sites for a Client's Sales and Distribution system.

This system allows full integration of Sales Route Management (Route Calls, Booking activities), Order Processing (Order encoding, Stock allocation, credit checking & approval, Invoicing & delivery documents generation) and Financial Transactions (Accounts Receivables, Collections and daily closing activities) and Reporting (Reports, Portal). Quite an ambitious undertaking (implementing to over a dozen provincial plants with close to 80 sales offices - and integrate all these locations into one system using a Web Portal application).

These past 3 weeks, I have been hopping from one place to another to check out and oversee the Teams assigned, conduct Business Process trainings, monitor progress of sites' preparation activities. In a week, I was in Naga, then Tacloban & Tanauan (in Leyte) and then took a 6-hour bus ride to La Union - all in just 5 days.

With pride, the Team in Leyte was able to 'cutover' the Plant to the new system last week ( I was there with the Team when they worked over night and completed all transactions 10:00am the next day). But it was a succesful cutover - I should say, where local users were able to transition to the new system more easily.

Naga site encountered some few roadblocks, nonetheless, a smooth cutover was done last weekend. Both Teams (Naga & Leyte) will move on to the sales offices next week - starting on 04-February and should be finished by next weekend.

Since Wednesday, I'm in La Union to oversee the transition and cutover activities. Yesterday, the Team succesfully cutover the site to the new system as well. It feels good that the Teams were as reliable as ever, and this makes every Project Manager very proud!

It's almost done - and I will definitely find ways to give another challenging projects for these Teams.

The Consulting team that I was tasked to manage is composed of 12 young, energetic, talented, smart and beautiful men and ladies who are always up to take every challenge given to them. With these in my arsenal, we can readily take any Sales and Distribution and Finance projects with ease and finesse.

For information and project interest, contact the blogger.

~ The Cutover Experience
~ Bloggista.com

Its the final lap, the 4th quarter, the last stretch of our systems implementation of this multinational company with Head Office in Manila and around a dozen Plants nationwide with more than a hundred installation sites.

We have finally come to the final leg of our project. The last 3 plants have to be rolled out by March, 2008. Things are getting more exciting, the Team is even more aggressive.

Trainings are started this week simultaneously. There's a site in Leyte, one in Naga City and the other in Northern Philippines.

We are targeting to Cutover and do the data migration next week, after a week-long training. All static data are now currently finalised and should be signed-off by end of the week.

More on this, soon.

~ http://cutover.blogspot.com
~ http://bloggista.com

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

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.

At last, after a thorough review this morning, the Technical Team was able to run the legacy system Accounts Receivable and Sales volume migration into the new Sales and Distribution system. Reports of both systems were generated and reconciled. Only a few minor concerns were noted, and were immediately resolved later in the afternoon.

We used the previous night's transactions cut-off for the migration. All transactions for today, 23-Nov will be encoded manually into the new system.

All system transactions shall commence on Saturday, where all deliveries for Monday will be processed in the system.

It was a pleasant experience for everyone during our meeting. An enlightenment meeting as they said. They realised the reasons of their cutover delay. A good note was sent by the Finance Manager to the Controller regarding the project issues and how those were resolved. May post it here later.

We ended the day at 11:00pm, but, felt fulfilled...

Well I got to finish this one.

After just 2 hours of sleep - nap if some would call it, I was on the 5:10am flight to Zamboanga this morning. After 1 hour and 30 minutes, we landed in Zamboanga, with lots of uniformed and armed policemen. later found out that the chief of the Philippine National Police was my co-passenger.

I rented a van an instructed the driver to bring me to this Nature resort - Woodland somewhere in Zambowood. Well those names sounded like I was and in Singapore.

It was a quiet, relaxing, early morning ride along a narrow road lined with big trees - perhaps, the resort is speaking for itself. Then I remembered the reason why I am here in Zamboanga today - this site's cutover is already delayed for four (4) days now. My team on site - reporting to me myriad of concerns since day one of their arrival (they came 5 days earlier).

I have recommended to the Project Steering Committee in the previous week when I was in Davao that Zamboanga cutover had to be delayed - reasons? Data are simply not signed-off, too much revision requests, poorly prepared, templates not properly filled up, customer master not cleaned up and to simply put it: Data Prep was a mess in this side of the world.

This project involves all of the key functions of my client's organization. We segregated the main activities into three (3) components; Pre-work (Data Preparation) to be managed by the Sales Team, Legacy System cleanup and Migration to be managed by the IT/Technical Team, and the Site Users Training, Cutover and hand-holding support activities which I am managing together with the 12 Consultants we hired, trained in boot-camp and now roll-out experts.

This arrangement enabled us to move from each plants faster - however, this time (as in the case of the previous sites - but not this worse), data preparation activities were simply a failure. Unfortunately, the delay affected the balance activities, and recovering maybe impossible. Lesson learned - this is one of the reasons why companies such as my client, need third party resources/Consultants so that the required dirty work is surely done.

Well going back to the topic, data preparation plays a crucial role in achieving smooth system transition by ensuring all required data are accomplished and submitted, signed-off and cut-off. Data Prep is in the critical path of a project's first milestones.

After a checklist meeting with the whole Zamboanga Team, it was agreed that the migration be run today using 22-Nov transactions, and start the cutover activities tomorrow (Sat). It was a complete turn-around of events, and impressions. Most thought that at the rate preparations were going, Zamboanga may need another week to cutover.

Small victories despite the delay - I should be able to re-configure my next sites' deployment plan easily, and not as complex as earlier feared.

Still, it was a victory.

Today also marked another project success. Our Davao Plant Team succesfully migrated the Plant's old system to the new Route Sales to Delivery to Receivables system. Being the 9th Plant to roll out the new S&D system this year, Davao is the biggest Plant in the Mindanao Region. 5 of its Sales Offices are also included, and will be rolled-out to the new system as well starting next week.

My last visit was last week, where I met with the Team and the Plant Team to discuss and resolve several transition issues. I am scheduled to visit next week to oversee the roll-out of one of the biggest Sales Offices.

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.