CASE STUDY

The Situation

I stepped into an ERP program at Olympus shortly after go-live. The system was unstable, the program was over budget, and the user community did not trust the data. Basic business questions, like viewing a customer's activity across divisions, could not be answered. The legacy ERP environment had been heavily customized over many years, making it increasingly expensive to support and difficult to evolve.

Operational procedures for each division had been designed to make the new ERP behave like the old system, rather than to adopt the best practices built into the new platform.

Management had little confidence in operational and supply chain reporting. IT and business morale were low. The previous CIO and CFO had departed, leaving a significant leadership void at the executive level.

A large consulting firm and a regional implementation partner had stepped in to fill the gap and were effectively directing the program. The arrangement was costly, reduced internal ownership, and was not producing the operational results the business expected.

Restoring Leadership, Governance and Accountability

The first work was leadership recovery. I re-established clear ownership between the business and IT, restored governance discipline over decisions that had drifted to the outside consultants, and rebuilt the accountability structures the program needed to move again. When I arrived, the team was running four-hour issue-resolution meetings every day — an unsustainable drain on the organization with limited output. I restructured the process into a disciplined triage-and-priority approach, drove the backlog down materially, and gave the team its time back. Within several months the environment was stable enough to make the harder strategic decision that came next.

A Strategic Pivot: Select the Right Platform For the Long-Term

Once the environment stabilized, it became clear that the legacy platform could not support the company's long-term business strategy.

I led the enterprise-wide business requirements definition, evaluation, selection, and approval of a new ERP platform, negotiated the vendor and implementation partner contracts, prepared the recommendation for the Olympus Board in Japan, and obtained approval.

Executing the transformation

I then led a cross-functional team of more than 70 people through a two-year implementation across five divisions. The program was delivered on time, within budget, and within approved scope. We made a deliberate decision to reverse the patterns that had undermined the previous system: avoid unnecessary software modifications, adopt the application's best practices, and redesign business processes to align with the new platform rather than forcing the platform to replicate the old way of working. That decision required real change management with functional leaders and users, but it protected long-term maintainability and total cost of ownership.

The most important focus throughout was user adoption and operational improvement. An ERP that is technically live but not truly used by the business does not create value. We invested in the training, change management, and process discipline that made the system trusted, adopted, and used as the operational system of record.

The outcome

The business realized the intended supply chain and operational benefits. Pick and pack times were reduced by 50%. Leadership regained confidence in operational reporting and could once again manage the business through the ERP. Cross-division customer visibility, never achievable on the legacy platform, was in place. The governance and accountability structures put in place during the recovery phase carried forward into the new platform, protecting the investment over time. Leadership regained confidence in the information used to make operational decisions.

What it took

Technology was not the hardest part of this transformation. Leadership was.

Success required executive alignment, governance, accountability, disciplined execution, and a willingness to redesign business processes rather than force the ERP to replicate the past.

In my experience, that's true of most successful ERP transformations

The implementation itself was never the goal. The goal was enabling the business to operate differently and better.