One of the world’s biggest chemicals suppliers decided to deploy a global SAP template. The vision was compelling: improve sales and operational planning, consolidate supplier base, move to shared services.
The execution was catastrophic.
The ambitious programme covered all critical business processes across a complex global organization. They chose a long-established global systems integrator for support.
The project soon ran into difficulties. Unrealistic programme design posed serious risk to business as usual.
“We had a hyper-care phase where all of the technical issues had to be resolved in a four week period as each country went live,” said the Team Leader.
Four weeks of frantic firefighting. Every country rollout triggered the same disaster cycle. Technical issues snowballed to overwhelm support teams.
Over-ambitious timescales with too much running in parallel created a repetitive nightmare. Each go-live became a crisis management exercise instead of a business transformation milestone.
The three-tier system had basic flaws. Lack of management accountability compounded problems. Quality control of the offshore development team was inadequate.
Business disruption became part of each rollout. The global template was creating global chaos instead of global consistency.
On third-party recommendation, the client engaged Pivot for immediate technical review and audit. Pivot consultants identified fundamental setup flaws.
The client asked Pivot to take over technical ownership and address identified issues.
First, Pivot implemented a five-tier landscape. The team could move, transport, and configure through each project while maintaining separate systems to ensure business as usual.
This stopped the business disruption that had plagued each rollout. Stability replaced chaos.
Pivot addressed project elements falling short of best practice. Removing poor transports that should never have been allowed. Implementing professional change control ensuring nothing was released into test environment without management approval.
“We could see the methodologies introduced by Pivot’s consultants were getting results straight away. The hyper care period immediately after each go live, was a lot more stable. They highlighted concerns about certain development approaches and offered alternatives. This added immense value,” said the Team Leader.
The hyper-care hell cycle was broken. Country rollouts became stable business improvements instead of technical firefighting exercises.
The ambitious transformation programme got back on track to deliver promised returns across the global organization.
The Team Leader’s appreciation for Pivot as “an extension of our team” who “got to know us as a business” captures the partnership transformation.
Pivot delivered technical excellence that turned repetitive disasters into sustainable success.
Over-ambitious timescales and parallel processing can create unsustainable support cycles where every success triggers weeks of crisis management. Pivot proved that proper technical foundations enable global rollouts without global chaos.
