Atos Origin
[Atos Origin] was formed in October 2000 following a merger between the French company Atos and Origin B.V. from the Netherlands. Prior to that, both companies were the creation of other smaller mergers and acquisitions starting from around 1976. In 1996, Origin B.V. was created after a merger of the Dutch company BSO and the Philips C&P (Communications & Processing) division, while a year later in 1997, Atos was created following a merger of the French companies Axime and Sligos. During my time at Origin in the US I worked on projects for:
- Solar Turbines,
- British Steel,
- Philips Electronics,
- Neways,
- Flextronics,
- APW,
- Crown
The major project implementations and detailed below.
Philips Components
In 1997 I transferred from Sinagpore to the Origin Consultancy practice in North America. The first project undertaken in the US was for Philips Components in Santa Clara CA and El Paso TX. The objective of the Project was to implement Baan in the El Paso Warehouses and at the Finance and Administration center in Santa Clara. Being a large distribution center the key success factors were interfacing Baan successfully with a bar-code scanning system and ensure rapid put away and retrival of products using Cross-Docking, Golden Zone location control and Wave building warehouse management techniques. A secondary success factor was implementing Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and GL and interfacing it with Philips general accounting system hosted by SAP. The project was completed in eight months.
Implementation Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 5
- Project Budget: Approximately US3million
- Project Length: 8 Months
Neways, Provo Utah 1998-1999
Established in 1992 in Salem, Utah, Neways creates, manufactures, and distributes an extensive line of personal care products, nutritional supplements, and household products. Similar to its more famous counterparts like Avon and Amway, its products are sold through distributors.
When I led a Baan ERP implemetation during the fall of 1998, Neways was going through a very rapid period of growth. It was a family owned business generating a lot of cash and profits through its distribution channels that had reached many countries. Whereas money to spent on IT projects was plentiful, Neways was still lacking many of the usual business and manufacturing practices. Our main objective in the first phase was implement the basic Baan modules and manage and reduce the high level of raw material and finished goods inventory in the warehouse. We also implemented the basic AR, AP and GL modules. For this project I pulled together a team of five full time consultants including myself and brought other consultants in to work on ad-hoc project tasks as needed.
By April 2009 the first phase was completed as scheduled and we began work on phase 2, which was to roll out the project to its Wellington, New Zealand facility and interface Baan with a bespoke credit card sales program written by a third party programmer. The second phase was less successful insofar as that although we were able to implement the Baan sales module features successfully, the third-party credit card application was designed with too many flaws and eventually abandoned by Neways.
Project Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 8 including part-time consultants
- Project Budget:US$4million
- Length of Project:11 months.
Flextronics, San Jose 2000
Flextronics is one of the world largest Electronic Manufacturing Service (EMS) companies in the world. They design and manufacture many of the branded electronic devices on sale world wide. Flextronics were located figuratively and literally in the heart of the Silicon Valley boom of the middle to late 1990's. They were growing rapidly both organically and by acquisition and by the time I had first been introduced to them they already had 40 facilities in California and elsewhere.
The CEO, Michael Marks had decided that a single ERP system should be implemented across Flextronics for cost and logistical reasons. When I first worked on a Flextronics implementation, Baan had all ready be implemented in many of the facilities in San Jose. Their first implemenation had taken one year and many millions of dollars. At this rate it would take 40 years to implement just the facilities currently owned by Flextronics and bankrupt the company in the meantime. It was decided that all future implementations take 8-12 weeks and following a strict non-customized roll-out schedule. My initial role was to design and implement a web-based training system to roll out to the sites as a part of a continuous training initiative.
I worked with another consultant and a Flextronics employee to develop the training material over eight weeks before handing over to Flextronics for deployment. Later in 2000 I demonstrated the web-based training system at the Baan World User Conference in Quebec City.
Project Summary
- Role: Project Manager
- Consultants Directly Supervised: 1
- Project Budget: US$75,000
- Length of Project: 10 weeks.
Flextronics, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Continuing its stategy of implementing a single ERP across all sites, Flextronics had recently purchased a new business in Portsmouth, New Hampsire. Currently, this facility was using SAP and our objective was to migrate them off SAP and retrain the staff on Baan. On the positive side, the users were well trained users of an ERP system however migrating and retraining the users was more difficult. For instance, in SAP there were perhaps 25 MRP codes bur in Baan there were less than half that amount. There was amongst the users that they and we had to acsomplish
