Project management of a two-country factory ERP rollout

Weber & Iyer Precision Parts makes machined components for car makers and industrial pump companies. It has 460 employees at a plant near Stuttgart and 380 at a plant in Chakan, Pune. Each plant runs a different, ageing ERP system, and month-end close takes 12 working days because finance reconciles the two by hand.

The board has approved a single cloud ERP for both plants, covering finance, procurement, inventory, production planning and quality. The budget is €2.4 million including the implementation partner, and the go-live target is 1 April next year, the start of the Indian financial year, which leaves about 11 months. A first attempt two years ago was stopped after the German works council objected that it had not been consulted about how the system would record employee activity, and the Pune team felt the design was done in Germany without them.

You are the project management officer, working for the programme manager. In eight weeks you will build the project's management system: - a charter with scope, objectives, success measures and governance; - a stakeholder map and engagement plan, including the works council in Germany and plant leadership and key users in Pune; - a work breakdown and schedule with the major phases, cutover and hypercare; - a RAID log (risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies) with owners and responses; - a budget and status reporting pack with earned-value style tracking; - a go-live readiness checklist and a steering committee pack.

Done means the programme manager could run the next steering committee from your pack, every major risk has an owner and response, and the cutover plan shows what happens hour by hour over the go-live weekend in both time zones.