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ERP Implementation

When the trial balance won’t load at midnight

Oracle Financials · China JV · 1999

Situation

A global medical device manufacturer was racing to retire its legacy mainframe ahead of a hard Y2K deadline. The replacement was Oracle Financials Release 10, deployed in a China joint venture of ~1,000 employees with CNY primary and USD reporting books. There was no internal precedent in the region, no global team to call, and no room to miss the date. By 8pm on go-live night, the trial balance would not load and the period would not open.

Intervention

While the team worked through the same configuration checks, I went back to the Oracle user guides. The reporting set of books had never been initialized — no open periods on the reporting side meant Oracle would not allow any transactions to proceed, regardless of what was configured on the primary side. I built the reporting set of books responsibilities, opened the required periods, and the trial balance loads cleared immediately.

Outcome

On-time delivery against a non-negotiable regulatory deadline. We then documented everything: period management across primary and reporting books, journal source and category controls, adjustment period configuration, prior period entry permissions, and restatement journal setup. Those SOPs became the reference standard adopted across ~30 countries in the subsequent global rollout. Years later, when the global FP&A team faced a regulatory issue with fines on the line, they called — because we had built the framework first and written it down.

FP&A Modernization

Sometimes the right answer is to stop

PBF Digitalization Program · Global Building Products · Multi-ERP environment

Situation

A global building products manufacturer was running its entire planning, budgeting and forecasting cycle out of Excel — with inputs pulled manually from three separate SAP instances, homegrown databases, and a constellation of disconnected systems. Reporting ran through HFM/FCCS but the underlying data had no central home, no standardized process, and no governance. Everything was manual: punch it in, download, massage, upload, repeat. The company had engaged me to implement a PBF digitalization solution. What they believed they had was a tool problem. What they actually had was a data problem.

Intervention

I spent 6–8 months mapping the current state in detail, chairing the steering committee, and working directly with the C-suite and senior leadership across finance, IT, and operations. The picture that emerged was unambiguous: without a data lake, a data organization, and a proper data architecture to centralize and standardize the inputs, no PBF tool would solve anything. It would create another silo on top of an already fragmented landscape. Three senior internal leaders — the IT lead, the Applications lead, and Finance Directors in both Europe and the Americas — had already reached the same conclusion independently and moved on. I took the recommendation to halt the program to the GTMO lead, who seconded it. Leadership made the call to stop. I delivered a structured blueprint covering data organization design, architecture recommendations, and a sequenced roadmap for how to do it properly when the organization was ready.

Outcome

A multi-million dollar program — one that would have required significant process changes, upgrades across three ERP instances, new application licensing, and substantial implementation work — was stopped before those costs were incurred. The program remained dormant for over a year. The organization went through further leadership change, including a CEO departure and the appointment of a new CIO and Chief Data Officer. When the program was eventually restarted, it was structured with a proper PMO, a Big 4 implementation partner, and the data foundation work prioritized first — precisely the approach the blueprint had outlined.