The senior team paved the way for its resolution by establishing afirm date for closing all open business processes. At the same timesenior management acknowledged the hard work of the team andencouraged them to move forward to make the project happen. Thisturned out to be just what was needed. In effect, it solidified theworking relationship between IT and the business, not only for the ERPproject but for future initiatives as well.

Making 'Go Live' A Success

Meticulous planning for the 'go live' was another criticalpart of the implementation.

"The timeline was very tight," said Girgis. "If you used the newsystem for four hours or more you couldn't go back because the volumeof transactions would be so huge it would take days to put theinformation back in the legacy system."

The new system was going live on a Monday morning. On Sunday, all ofthe conversions were finished and some people were brought in to usethe system, inputting the small number of transactions that hadoccurred on the weekend. This was the first real exercise of thesystem.