Bombardier Reflection

Case: Bombardier:  Successfully Navigating the Skies of a Large Scale ERP Implementation

Members of the Board

I would like to follow-up with you after our presentation by the consulting team on Tuesday night.  The consultants had some interesting ideas and our management team learned some good information about the overall industry 12 step standard for ERP implementations.  My research had come across various “industry standard” practices, while the consulting team’s overall framework appears to definitely be more useful.

The consulting team presented us with 3 recommendations:

• Include function specialists in design and implementation activities with formal processes in place that can be based on a scorecard to show progress for both design and implementation. 
• Hire 3 full time subject matter experts (SME’s) with industry knowledge as well as an SAP knowledge base in order to remove IT consultants from the equation.  
• Either enhance the SAP features to accommodate our current specialized contract management process or standardize the contract management process to conform with SAP functionality.

I would agree that both the formal process and function specialists as well as enhancing the SAP features to accommodate the contract management process would be beneficial in our 3^rd round of implementation, I am a little hesitant with regard to the consultant’s second recommendation of hiring 3 SME’s to replace the existing > 400 IT consultants.  According to the consulting team’s presentation, hiring three SME’s would save roughly $130,000 annually, however I feel that more than 3 SME’s would be needed which would no longer make this option as cost effective as suggested.  While subject matter experts are probably something we should discuss in a little more detail as they are probably beneficial to the implementation, I feel that they would not completely take the place of the IT consultants.  This may be a good proposal, but I feel that we may need some more information and/or discussion around this topic before we could offer it as a true recommendation. 

One additional recommendation that I would have in addition to the above would be enhancements to training.  While the consultants felt that our training practices were acceptable, I feel that they could be adjusted after some feedback from employees at the Maribel and Saint-Laurent sites.  Similar to my initial discussions with you on this topic, a more generalized training before implementation may be beneficial with more specialized follow-up training sessions once employees have had the opportunity to use the system.  Feedback from several employees was that from the time they had training to the time they started using the system they had forgotten things.  It would seem that having more follow-up training once people are slightly familiar with the functionality would ease the transition along.

Thank you for your time and please let me know if you would like for me to set up a follow-up with the consulting team.