A Unique Way to Gain Buy-In
A typical scenario when a company decides to replace business systems is upper management or a group of stakeholders makes the decision and everyone conforms to the new system.
G&W’s CEO wanted to do things differently. He asked a consultant to do the research, then formed a small team of employees to select more than a dozen ERP solutions. This small team would whittle the list down while more employees were added to evaluate those solutions after each round.
Once the final three were narrowed, they conducted a blind survey of all three asking which was the better solution—and they arrived at the Plex Manufacturing Cloud®. Throughout this process (about nine months long), the CEO achieved endorsement across the company.
“Getting buy-in is the first step in really being successful at implementing an ERP system. If Gary had come to us initially and said, here’s what we’re going to buy and here’s what we’re going to use, things may not have turned out as well as they did,” said Jeff Karan, Director of IT.
For the initial implementation, the company had two facilities to get online which took about four months, due in part to entering 18,000 part numbers manually versus data migration. Karan says he and his team learned a lot about the importance of “good data in, good data out” during the implementation.
“The reason why we had to hand enter part numbers was because the information in the old system was unusable. We could put very little information into it, and there were a lot of restrictions on fields and the amount of characters that could be put in so project managers basically managed the facility (literally) from operation to operation,” said Karan.
