Eton Bridge Consulting was engaged by a global logistics business to support one of their divisions with an annual turnover of £250 million and 2,900 employees. The organisation was mid-way through an SAP S4 HANA implementation programme which had stalled. They invited Eton Bridge Consulting to perform an independent programme review to identify if there were any areas that needed to be addressed to ensure the successful delivery of the desired benefits.

Situation

The division was to be sold to a competitor in December 2020, so the work was critical to ensure the successful outcome of a multi-million pound, market-sensitive share transaction timed for the financial year-end.

As part of the share transaction, Eton Bridge Consulting was asked to establish the project, business, and technical confidence for the board (CEO, CFO and COO).

The ERP (SAP) project was running late by more than 2 years; it had made limited progress, ultimately getting stuck and then failing to exit systems integration testing prior to go-live. This was due to weak governance, a poorly qualified Systems Integrator (more of an accommodating developer/coder), and an invalid set of design documents with no traceable business requirements (i.e. no objective evidence for business validation and approval).

Approach

Against the backdrop of a complex stakeholder environment, tight time frames and high pressure, the Eton Bridge Consulting team worked in close partnership with the client. They:

• Conducted a strategic review, evaluated the transformation journey to date and then re-set the programme for future success linking business improvement/value, the ERP project together with IT / data solution delivery for improved coherence
• Worked on the client-side as a “badge less” member of governance and leadership team acting as “critical friend and coach”
• Supported Executive Business Sponsor (Country CEO) and Exco board members to strategically re-set and re-align the programme including scope, road map, deployment and the “end to end” delivery model
• Created Programme Management Office, Vendor Management Office, Change Methodology, tools and Quality Assurance team
• Supported an independent review by PwC.

Results

Within 6 months, the team had successfully:

• Designed and set up a best practice PMO and delivery assurance capability to be leveraged across the programme, linking and integrating finance, IT and data
• Reviewed and remediated the core template design deliverables (6 components). This included process strategies, business requirements, process models (L3), business process designs ready for SI discovery and realisation
• Re-instated a failing legacy systems replacement project as a business change programme leveraging hybrid (waterfall and agile best-practice methods) to deliver the business priorities and outcomes with finance (CFO) and IT leadership (CIO)
• Re-scoped and remediated the core template design artifacts, linking in executive process owners and business requirements to drive business ownership, understanding and forward commitment
• Identified, qualified and sourced a leading tier-1 strategic systems integrator to deliver the project on a fixed price/milestone earned value basis for circa £6.5m within 12-14 months (leveraging a landed and offshore based team). The cost estimated to be within 2% for planning purposes.

Eton Bridge Consulting quickly identified where the programme issues were and changed the scope of their work to ensure that there was no unnecessary spend by the client. By creating a hybrid team through the identification of key talent in the business, they were able to leave the programme in a sustainable position having created the foundations to enable it to deliver.

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