Approaching ERP in a highly distributed organization

The Story

Moravia is a leading globalization solution provider, enabling companies in the technology and life sciences industries and global brands to enter international markets with high quality multilingual products. Moravia maintains global headquarters in the Czech Republic and North American headquarters in California, with local offices and production centers in Japan, China, Latin America, Ireland, USA and throughout Europe. After a phase of strong growth Moravia had outgrown its core business applications and had to look for an enterprise-grade ERP system to ensure business continuity. The challenges were comprehensive and diverse:

• Needs: How to find a solution that meets the diverse and often contradictory needs of stakeholders from Executive Board, Service Delivery Management, Finance & Controlling, IT and HR?
• Scale: How to find a solution that can handle not just today’s but also tomorrow’s high volume of micro-transactions across customers and vendors?
• Legacy: How to find a solution that fits into the existing application ecosystem of the company that had grown widely over the past years?
• People: How to deal with fears within the organization due to past failed attempts of introducing a new ERP solution – how to get people on board again?

PROCOMM consulted the executive board at Moravia in choosing the right project governance model and the right set of technologies to approach these challenges within the international distributed organisation. Also, PROCOMM supported Moravia’s project team in implementing a working, tangible prototype to validate assumptions and measuring confidence within the organization.

The Solution

Our approach was two-fold: One stream specifically for the business stakeholders focused on functional needs in the short-, mid- and long-term to support the business in their mission. A second stream focused on the technical big-picture to ensure that new functionality will be built on top of a sustainable technology platform that will be able to handle continued growth. Unlike a past attempts of a big-design-up-front evaluation the team had chosen a prototype approach to get tangible results and to get confidence within the organization. To achieve this, an interdisciplinary team of 20 people was set up to accept this challenge. In a first phase, 149 business use cases were identified together with key stakeholders from end-to-end production process and technical areas. In a second phase, a working prototype was designed and built in an agile-manner. In a third phase, the prototype was tested and verified by the key stakeholders to determine the confidence level within the organization for the designed solution.

The Result

Traditional ERP software-vendors try to sell a one-size-fits-all software package and try to fit everything into it. However, the project team understood that one centralized ERP system would not be able to satisfy the diverse needs within the organization. ERP systems are slow and expensive to change and so the design concluded that only standardized corporate processes should be covered by the ERP. On the other hand, strategic processes that are Moravia-specific should be covered by to autonomous custom-applications to ensure that business is not getting constrained in its need for flexibility and global distribution. The team came up with a working, tangible prototype consisting of four interconnected systems. The prototype covered a wide range of major business processes from order, purchase, pricing to invoice. Within 6 months the prototype project completed with a result of 77% of all use cases being covered – reflecting a good level of confidence. At the time of writing Moravia is conducting the planning phase related to ERP.