Health Check Recovers Failing ERP Project

PE-backed retail and leisure carve-out

Value Highlights

A small business carve-out had a transitional service agreement (TSA) to decouple itself from the parent companies systems within 6 months of separation. A project manager had been hired to help get the system delivered but 4 months in, the deadline was looming and the Sage 500 ERP project was heading for failure.

What were the challenges?

Deliverables were not clear or documented and critical phases were not going to be delivered on time. Critically, the timeline for the migration was unmovable and the end date for the TSA was final. There was no coherent migration plan of action, financial reconciliation processes were incomplete and financial year end auditors were adding complexity to the process. The target operating model was poorly defined and new business processes (operational and financial) were still in development. Training documentation was incomplete. Meanwhile, the pressure was mounting from the PE house to deliver the system as the TSA ended in 8 weeks’ time.

So, what did we do?

We developed a new and detailed milestone plan, bringing the management team, key suppliers and partners together to ‘own’ parts of the plan. We managed the vendor very tightly indeed, negotiating additional support (cost-free). We delivered the plan ahead of time to avoid the summer holidays where resources would be unavailable.

Working as ‘part of the investee’ team in a sleeves up approach to get the organisation moving in the right direction.