High-tech energy firm

Distress and disruption

The countries and businesses involved in the transformation had historically operated as independent entities with their own business processes and legacy systems, encompassing both SAP and non-SAP platforms. This presented a unique opportunity to bring them all under a unified future center of excellence structure, fostering efficiency through standardized processes and harmonized data.

Despite engaging multiple experienced system integrators (SIs) and suppliers for the ambitious program, the complexity and scale of the initiative overwhelmed the delivery. The program encountered severe distress, placing the TSA exit at high risk and causing significant disruptions during the initial go-live, necessitating a temporary shutdown of factories.

De-risking through governance, transparency, and discipline

In response to this critical situation, the client's board enlisted AlixPartners' expertise to assess and provide execution leadership for de-risking, rescuing and recovering the program. Our hand-picked senior team of distressed ERP program turnaround experts swiftly identified critical issues and related root causes. They defined necessary actions to de-risk the program, designed preconditions to restore progress, and promptly implemented big changes to rapidly turn around and recover the program.

Critical in the de-risking process was to alter the overall delivery and deployment approach. In reshaping a two-wave launch to a five-phase approach, any potential jeopardy was mitigated through incremental rollouts defined by the scale and complexity of business operations by individual jurisdiction while decoupling countries from the same system they operate
The implementation of stringent governance methodology, transparency, Power BI-led execution reporting, and discipline to support global delivery quickly established clear accountabilities for country, workstream, end-to-end process, and archetype leads. 

A highly complex matrix of business units, functions, regional leadership teams, country organizations, systems integrators, contractors, and ERP hosting companies required relentless but carefully balanced stakeholder management throughout the program. This was bolstered by the team’s on-the-ground, hands-on experience of the customer and product data, which would guide day-to-day decision making towards each country-specific rollout and cultivate a common mindset for success under intense time pressure.  

Boardroom counsel coupled with hands-on global execution

In building a trusted partnership with our client’s leadership team and global program stakeholder groups, marrying boardroom strategic counsel with meticulous attention to detail in execution, the team successfully delivered the program within the agreed timelines and milestones, instilling confidence and ensuring its successful delivery and value creation. 

Collaborating with our client and implementation partners, we have successfully gone live in the organization’s 60 countries of operation without encountering disruptions to any factory operations. 

Amidst many high-profile examples of large transformation programs that have failed due to their complexity, our work here proves that technological harmony can be achieved on a global scale, realizing the business benefits that may appear impossible at the outset.

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