Forget the past

To head off potential cultural clashes down the track, Ribbons was careful to involve users from right across the business during the system design phase.

It's always helpful to get users closely involved, she aid, adding "I'm very keen on that approach."

That approach, as it turned out, involved a considerable amount of navel-gazing as the project managers worked with individual divisions to critically review and restructure their operations.

Recognizing the extensive credentials of the Epicor system, the implementation team worked with Vantage distributor Cogita and division to adapt their processes to the models encapsulated within the system. This was a more difficult, but ultimately more promising, approach than trying to customize the software to the company's own requirements - a hazardous road that Bedford already knew far too well.

"We made the decision up front that we would not follow the route taken with our legacy system," Ribbons says. "With that system, we would put in enhancement request after enhancement request to make the system fit us. But what we've bought with Epicor is based on best practice, which really meant we should look at the way we were doing things."

That introspection resulted in some interesting findings - most importantly, perhaps, that the company's existing data store was far less accurate than would be hoped. This had already been known implicitly by staff that had, for years, relied on personally-developed Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to conduct the analysis they needed; their numbers might seem to work, but often didn't match those of other workers when compared.

Rather than getting caught up in a major data cleansing exercise, Ribbons' team made the decision to bypass its legacy almost completely.

Instead, conversations with business leaders identified the most crucial parts of the company's sales history, supplier files and customer files; this information was manually keyed into the newly implemented Epicor system.

"Data integrity was a bit of an issue with our old legacy systems," she explains. "By taking that approach, we had a clean slate to start with."