Clientcase IT Value creation
For one of Purple Square’s long-term customers who designs and manufactures Professional Lighting Solutions, Purple Square was asked to implement and deploy Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) for one of their complex plants.
EWM is used to efficiently manage inventory in a warehouse and supporting processing of goods movement. It allows a company to control inbound and outbound processes and movement of goods in the warehouse.
Customer challenges
The set up of this warehouse was changed from location specific to corporate standards, especially process and data design and definitions. This required focus on adoption of a new way of working as warehouse staff challenged “why to bother changing (again), as the current process/system works fine for over 10 years”. In general, overhead staff in warehouses is (close to) nonexistent so finding the right expertise and make subject matter experts (SME) available for the EWM project proved to be difficult.
During the EWM deployment the project team experienced a lot of “devil is in the detail” situations. The project team needed to be fully on top of these detailed issues and act accordingly to prevent deviating from the corporate standards. It took careful assessment of issues’ impact before communicating relevant information across all different stakeholders from executive management to operational warehouse staff.
Customer challenges
The set up of this warehouse was changed from location specific to corporate standards, especially process and data design and definitions. This required focus on adoption of a new way of working as warehouse staff challenged “why to bother changing (again), as the current process/system works fine for over 10 years”. In general, overhead staff in warehouses is (close to) nonexistent so finding the right expertise and make subject matter experts (SME) available for the EWM project proved to be difficult.
During the EWM deployment the project team experienced a lot of “devil is in the detail” situations. The project team needed to be fully on top of these detailed issues and act accordingly to prevent deviating from the corporate standards. It took careful assessment of issues’ impact before communicating relevant information across all different stakeholders from executive management to operational warehouse staff.
Deliverables
The challenging conditions required a tightly run EWM project with very strict controls in place to identify any changes to the plan at the earliest moment. Good project hygiene was conditional to deliver an accepted result for both the local warehouse staff and corporate process owners.
Project hygiene included:
- A validated business case including ROI calculations to manage budget and change requests;
- A detailed blueprint of the corporate standards, signed off by stakeholders;
- Peer reviewed, bottom-up and top-down estimates of work effort;
- A PMO with good project visibility, deliverable tracking, issue/risk management and communication track;
- Execute several tests, SIT/UAT/automated testing covering a maximum of business processes;
- Preparation of a detailed cutover runbook;
- Availability of all hardware, firewall, access points, scanners and printers within the warehouse.
Our contribution to success
To make full use of standard EWM functionality covering 70-90% of the business requirements, an experienced EWM team was put together headed by a senior warehouse manager. This team was frequently available on-site (especially during an extended hypercare period) which also allowed for training both key users and end users in the corporate way of working. During hypercare the EWM functionalities were only released after finalization of several “golden orders” and proper sign off. Sign off included all relevant stakeholders, not just warehouse management.