A Company That Couldn’t Close Their Books Following an SAP Implementation

As I work with people and companies that open themselves into the world of software implementation, generic claims of process improvement, and AI, one sticks out to me out of others. They had recently gone through an SAP implementation when I was brought on. They had been unable to close their books for 5 months and the CFO was making high level estimates to be able to present financials.I’m not sure if they knew where to start but at the base level of their operations, they could pay their bills and issue invoices to their customers. Even with all of those issues, they were attempting to bring on some data visualization tools and were meeting with vendors to get them up and running.

It was an enormous effort to go through all of their data that had been loaded into SAP, all of the incorrect transactions that occurred across the entire organization, and the lack of training and resources that were (not) there. I spent months cleaning up the systems and retraining departments to operate correctly so that I would be able to close the books and help the controller and CFO finalize all of the financials that they had been tentatively presenting. After showcasing to them what was in front of them, the decision was made to push back the data visualization project as it was going to be a poor effort with the kind of data quality that they had.

One thing I think about with this when considering the impact of their go-live that left them unable to operate within SAP is that it stemmed so far back from when they were even thinking about their software implementation. They were a global company that had their tech stack managed by the European parent company. These two operating units drove revenue differently. They had one SAP instance that was built for the manufacturing arm of the company but completely ignored how the sister company based in the US needed their ERP set-up.

Like many SAP implementations, this one went both long and over budget. By the time they were prepared to move the US division to SAP, they had to elect to find the lowest cost SAP partners whose whole goal was to “force” through so that it could be completed. There was a lack of planning and preparation as the timeline was so condensed to meet an already broken budget that there was no consideration for what happened after the fact.

I will call back to the start of this post to highlight the amount of effort that was needed. If there had been a level of preparation for data cleanup, process preparation for how SAP functions, and considerations of what they wanted past what they knew from their old ERP system, they could have avoided a lot of headaches.

While I was able to get them functional, there are so many software implementations that leave people, teams, processes, and companies broken. I have, oddly, found a lot of joy in helping people and teams get to a point where their data and processes are clean and functional and everyday isn’t a fight for success.

I’m curious how many other people out there have been impacted by or left companies as a result of their bad and poorly planned projects. 

Thanks for reading!