In this edition of the Guerrilla Project Management podcast, I interview Nicolas Sulla on large global rollouts.
I attended Nicolas’s presentation on this topic and invited him to share with us his experience from a global rollout of Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) in Latin America.
Nicolas is a global Project Manager with more than 15 years of experience implementing large systems in more than 30 countries in Latin America, North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
The Interview
Listen now:
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We discussed the following topics:
The project was for a U.S Telecommunication company experiencing rapid growth in Latin America. They needed to rollout an ERP system to support the accelerated opening of this new market.
The key ERP components implemented are: General Ledger, Account Payables, Account receivables, Cash Management, Purchasing, Project Accounting, Fixed Assets, Inventory, with localization.
The project was implemented in two phases: Latin America-Mexico and Latin America-Brazil. Mexico implementation was established as the standard Blue Print for future counties such as Chile and Columbia.
Some key information on the project:
- The ERP System was configured on a worldwide single-site/multi-org
- 2 Companies and 2 Distribution Centers with different geographic locations
- 2 Legal Entities, 2 Operational units, and 2 Inventory organizations
- The application was implemented in single language (English)
The Project used a rapid implementation approach with the following major phases:
- Questionnaires about business processes.
- Interviews using conference calls
- Pilot 1 (Conference Room Pilot 1)
- Pilot 2 (Conference Room Pilot 2)
- User Acceptance Testing
- Go Live
- Post Go Live support
Key Lessons Learned:
- The Benefits of using core team members who speak native language
- Don’t underestimate training effort
- Benefits of using English as the system language globally
- The benefits of establishing key regional super users to help with support
About Nicolas Sulla:
Nicolas is also a System Engineer and an MBA. He is highly experienced Project Manager in Globalization, localization, and local tax and regulations. He is fluent in 4 languages: English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
About Sagax Group, LLC:
Sagax Group is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They are experienced in implementations and system development in multicultural and multilingual environments throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
They specialize in areas such as: Oracle Applications 11i/R12 Implementations, Oracle Localizations, Applications Development, Data warehouse, IT Audits, and more.
Contact Information:
- Web site: www.sagaxgroup.com
- Email: nsulla@sagaxgroup.com
- Phone: 954-296-6646
As always, if you have any comments, questions, concerns, or rants, – or you just want to say hi – please feel free to leave a comment below. To your project success!
Listen now:
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