What is the longest project you have ever worked on?

Mead Corporation’s implementation of the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system began in the year 2000 with a four-year timeline and a $125 million budget.  Mead had looked at ERP systems a couple of times earlier in the 1990s and decided then that the company wasn’t culturally ready for a single, process-oriented system like SAP.  But late in the 1990s, multiple divisions began requesting funds to implement their own ERPs, different ones, of course, and corporate had already purchased an ERP called PeopleSoft, so another look was taken and SAP was the ultimate decision.

The key focus of the project was change management, from executive management to division leadership to the employees that would transact in SAP every day.  Four years is not a long time to implement a $4 billion company and executives tend to lose their enthusiasm towards the end.  To jumpstart the project, a preconfigured SAP system was purchased from Monsanto, the chemical company, which was also in a continuous process manufacturing business.  Eighty percent of what Monsanto configured for “Source and Support” processes, for example, accounting, finance, and purchasing was adopted by Mead and led to the first implementation only nine months after the project launched.  That implementation was at the Coated Board division, selected because it produced paper, a critical proving ground to show that SAP would work in our core paper businesses, but also less risky than the larger and more complex white paper business.  After implementing Source & Support, the project would follow up a few months later with the “Order Management” processes, for example, accepting orders, manufacturing and shipping the products, and collecting money.  All this was supported by process training, local expert (“Super Users”) training, and finally just-in-time end-user training.  We were within a year of finishing the project when the MeadWestvaco merger occurred, extending the timeline a couple of years, but at that time I took on the newly-created Chief Technology Officer role, and while still involved, I was no longer officially on the project.

My role during the project was the SAP Technology Director, having the BASIS, ABAP, and Data teams reporting to me, and I reported to the Vice-President in charge of the SAP project with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the CIO, my previous manager.  The BASIS team was responsible for the installation and support of the core SAP software, the ABAP team wrote programs, interfaces, and reports for the team, and the Data team extracted, cleansed, and loaded data from legacy applications into SAP.  I worked a lot with the I.T. organization and to meet the project’s aggressive timeline we had to use what we knew best, IBM mainframes, the DB2 database management system (DBMS), and Windows servers.  The “usual” technology stack back then was an Oracle DBMS on large UNIX servers, but we had almost nobody on staff familiar with those, much less an expert.  To support the large DB2 virtual memory requirement for SAP, Mead bought three of the first 64-bit mainframes that IBM rolled off their production line, and while that was a somewhat risky move, we encountered only a few manageable issues.  We had to figure out how to manage an application with over 100,000 tables and indexes.  We had to move to an integrated, once-a-month, four-hour data center outage, perhaps the most difficult change management effort.  We had to create real-time, queued, and batch integration architectures and address locking and performance issues.  

It was a very energy-filled, fast-paced, and continually challenging project which resulted in lots of great memories and lasting relationships.  

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Has anyone ever rescued you, figuratively or literally?

I credit Dr. Zimmer, my long-time chiropractor, for rescuing me from severe pain, one of the two miracles in my life.  During a vacation in California, I threw my back out and spent an agonizing day laying in bed, barely able to roll over.  It was the day before returning home and the next morning things were no better and I realized I could never make it down the stairs, drive the car to the airport or tolerate a four-hour plane ride to Ohio.  As I laid there trying to figure out what to do, I thought about the position Dr. Zimmer sometimes puts me in while adjusting my back, that being laying on my side, bottom leg extended, the top of my foot on the other leg tucked up behind my knee, and turning my shoulders in the opposite direction.  This position forces my lower back to push forward.  I assumed that position and laid there for forty-five minutes.  Then I got up, all pain gone, carried two suitcases down the stairs, drove to the airport, and flew home.  Dr. Zimmer, plus some divi
Read more

Tell me your favorite story about Moses

Moses was the perfect cat.  He was loving, at least to humans, and everyone adored him.  I would take him to appointments at the vet and he would walk down the check-in desk where all the staff would pet him to his delight and there’s.  He never weighed more than eight pounds even though I kept his food dish full all the time.  He ate when he was hungry or when I opened his favorite treat, a can of tuna fish.   Moses was also a fierce hunter.  When I moved into a new apartment, he spent the first couple of days getting rid of every ant and spider he could find.  He could easily jump six feet in the air and I once saw him clear a six-foot fence with graceful ease as some neighborhood dog gave a fruitless chase.  He only had claws on his rear feet, but that combined with his teeth were more than enough to take out his prey.  Combined with remarkable see-in-the-dark abilities, he would routinely disappear for hours and that leads to my favorite story. I rented a house in Kettering for a s
Read more

Share some early memories of your son, Michael

Mike was raised by his grandparents in Pennsylvania until he was school age, so unfortunately I don’t have infant or toddler memories to share.  But from the time I first met him, and still true today, the thing that springs to mind is that he is a happy guy.  As he grew up he developed into a very extroverted, out-going child, loving to ride bikes around the neighborhood with a pack of friends, attend ice cream socials at school, and strapping on skates for organized events at Skateworld of Kettering.  We lived a quarter-mile from Indian Riffle Park and he loved the swings, monkey bars, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds. Mike is a very determined person.  When he decided that he wanted to lose weight back in grade school, he controlled his diet, including eating cans and cans of tuna fish, to shed pounds until he was rail thin.  Then he decided to begin lifting weights and went after that with a passion, putting on solid muscle and eventually benching over three hundred pounds in hi
Read more