Scheduled to go live in November 2012 National Grid USA, a utility company serving gas and electric customers in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, were engaged in a SAP project already running 3 years yet marred in budget overruns and delays already.
Failure to go live would mean a further delay and additional spending.
They decided to go ahead with the roll-out. Although I’m sure they foreseen hurdles, they just couldn’t have guessed how challenging they were going to be.
The story did not progress well for National Grid USA.
The new system miscalculated time, pay rates, and reimbursements. Consequently employees were paid too much, too little, or nothing at all, and vendor invoices couldn't be processed.
Over the course of an (additional) 2 years, National Grid implemented a stabilization program; bringing in contractors to help with the issues of the system.
The calculated clean-up cost??
$585 million dollars; 150% of the initial project budget!!
What can we learn from previous ERP disasters???
While we can't predict the future we can keep in mind the experiences of many large companies like National Grid; preparing for the best outcome and plotting for worst-case scenarios are, in retrospect, a solid time investment.
Preparation, preparation, preparation – like a good education it’s not hard to carry and always useful.
At SeaPark Consultancy, we’re helping clients learn about the “BW/4HANA migration problem” by guiding & navigating them through the primary issues; our approach is to focus on your individual and specific requirements and work with alongside you to achieve the most successful outcome.
Assuming BW/4HANA migration is on your mind right now, would it be difficult for us to have a conversation soon?
Let’s Connect today on LinkedIn.
Also, read our previous blogs at https://www.seaparkconsultancy.com/blog-and-news
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