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

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.

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.