Radiodetection

Precision planning achieves weekend cut-over onto IFS Applications™

Radiodetection is an international organisation providing a range of products used in the location, mapping and inspection of underground pipelines and cables.  Sales turnover is in excess of $130m and since the mid Eighties success has been measured in terms of a consistent 15 percent compound growth in earnings and profitability.

Currently the company employs over 700 people, the majority being located at its headquarters and manufacturing base near Bristol, England.  It also has two other sister manufacturing units, one in the UK the other in the USA, plus a worldwide supply chain of wholly owned subsidiaries in 18 locations covering 17 countries.

The problem

Radiodetection wanted a coherent business process management system on which to continue its future development.  The company was using a traditional financials package together with a highly tailored DOS based manufacturing system that was becoming increasingly difficult to support.

“We had simply outgrown the technology and it was time for a fresh approach, based on current best practice,” said Information Systems Manager, Paul Funnell.

Part of Radiodetection’s growth has come from selectively acquiring successful sales agents and service support distributors and making them wholly owned subsidiaries.  This has resulted in an international network, focused exclusively on the marketing and support of Radiodetection products.

In February 1998 Radiodetection was itself acquired by United Dominion Industries (UDI), now part of SPW, a multi-industry group with projected annual sales revenues topping £5 billion in 2001.

The acquisition by UDI provided the funding to continue the expansion strategy but broadening the scope to include other manufacturing companies offering complementary products which can be marketed through Radiodetection’s growing sales network.

The need to integrate all these interests and really understand what was happening in the business highlighted the shortcomings of the existing system.  It was time to install a full-blown enterprise system to consolidate all the financial information and obtain greater visibility on profits, costs and opportunities.

The solution: Business process review

A steering group with board level representation was formed as the first step towards finding a solution.  “The emphasis was on the business and we looked at the whole project as a business project rather than an IT project,” said Paul Funnell.

The company also retained an independent adviser Computer Consultants Limited (CCL) to drive the project and help keep everyone focused on the project objectives.

The project started in July 1999 with a business review and re-engineering exercise.  Twelve core business processes were identified of which seven were selected as priorities for review and re-definition.

Manufacturing was given particular attention, being central to the whole business.  Of special interest were the relationship with engineering and how design releases and product support flow between the two departments.

Other areas included order fulfilment and how manufacturing requirements are fed into procurement and how materials are supplied.  The sales function was also included, looking at how the company promoted its products, forecast production orders and maintained a feed of potential customer information into the order fulfilment process.

“Order fulfilment is a key process because it has so much customer focus that it affects the perception of the business and how easy you are to do business with, how good you are all round,” said Paul Funnell.

The review also encompassed Customer Service Support looking at specific requirements for after-market servicing and support, technical support and field trials.  Radiodetection produces complex technical products and sales often depend on the success of field trials, ‘solving real work problems for its customers’.

Cross-functional teams were formed to undertake the reviews.  Each team included representatives from various levels within the company from senior management to shop floor.  Conference sessions were held to map the various processes as they existed, highlight any inherent problems and consider possible solutions.

“From these discussions we created our ideal processes – a top level utopian vision.  Whilst it was accepted that there would likely be some compromises, these provided the initial template and statement of requirements for the new enterprise system.”

The review also helped to refine business objectives.  In addition to its acquisitions strategy, Radiodetection aims to grow market share by achieving market leading product performance.

This means reducing overall time to market by enabling a more concurrent model within the company’s engineering, research and development activities.  Quality and reliability will also benefit through better integration of engineering, QA and service and repair functions.

Also during the assessment stage the company recognised a major problem with the quality of existing data in the legacy systems.  So part of the project was dedicated to a data analysis and clean up exercise in preparation for the new system.

“Finally and perhaps most important of all,” stresses Paul Funnell was to have a properly trained work force motivated to operate the system effectively.  “There is no point in having all these wonderful re-mapped processes and a great new system if people do not understand how to use it,” he said.

The solution: Selection process

Radiodetection produced a detailed invitation to tender (ITT) outlining all of its requirements for the business processes.  Prospective suppliers were asked to score themselves between 1-5 on each of the applications.

A Project Team was formed to undertake the evaluation.  This comprised 12 members, 11 senior managers and a company director, maintaining the strong representation and board level commitment to the project.  A full time project manager from the business side was appointed to work with Paul Funnell.  For the remainder of the team came the task of juggling time to handle their daily responsibilities with commitment to the project.

The initial evaluation produced a shortlist of four possible vendors: IFS, and three rivals including UDI’s incumbent supplier and preferred choice.  Each was visited for detailed demonstrations on key areas to follow up their ITT responses and the list was then reduced to a choice between IFS and UDI’s candidate.

Both vendors were scored again taking into account functional and process related categories such as easy of use, cultural fit and people fit.  Each category was weighted to reflect the perceived significance given by each team member.  In the final analysis IFS came top in 13 out of 15 categories and comfortably top overall without the weighting given for the parent company’s preference.

“Our board’s recommendation was accepted by UDI on the basis that IFS offered Radiodetection the best solution.  In effect it simply puts the onus back on us to make it work,” said Paul Funnell.

Implementation

Contract negotiations were completed and the IFS implementation kicked off with the Project Team training.  CCL’s involvement continued through contract negotiations and on into the implementation phase, working closely with IFS through the process validation stage.

The first phase of the project was aimed at replacing all the existing functionality of the previous systems.  That was in manufacturing distribution, financials, order processing, purchasing, customer service and quality assurance.

Engineering became involved because the restructured process transferred responsibility for the products’ bill of material structures from production control.  This has resulted in better control on the build standard as previously certain procedures and processes were not enforced rigidly and engineering didn’t always have the visibility of changes made because of the requirements of the manufacturing process.

During the process validation phase of the project, each of the process teams sat down with their mapped top-level ‘utopian’ process to see how it would run through the IFS Applications system.  This provided the opportunity to refine their ideas by comparison with the business process models delivered by IFS through its web help screen.  This facility integrates into the core product allowing users to launch specific application screens.

“Another guiding principle was that we would do the minimum modifications to the IFS system required to get all our processes running the way we wanted.

“Wherever differences occurred we would compare our processes with IFS and see if we could adapt to the IFS standard,” said Paul Funnell, adding: “actually we have finished up with just six minor modifications for the entire platform.”

A conference room pilot run was carried out confirming that the company had a viable overall business process as well as all the individual processes.  Training within the company started the following month.

This covered the basic user interface of the product, how to retrieve data, how to do queries, how to write their own quick reports and customise their own environment.  Because of its flexible Windows environment the IFS screen can be tailored easily to provide individual job lists or work to do lists.

Some 160 users were trained and the introductory sessions were carried out by Paul Funnell, who used the opportunity to sell-in the practical benefits of the new business systems and provide an identifiable figurehead on the technical side of the project.  “We felt this was important in getting the system accepted and working,” said Paul.

Following this came the detailed process training for all of the users who will be on the system.  Overtime was allowed to encourage them to practice and familiarise themselves with the system.  At the same time the company’s Business Systems Supervisor and the team, responsible for the in-house deployment of the technology, started to do cutover training.

The project included the procurement of a new hardware on which to run the system.  Sun Microsystems Enterprise 3500 was selected in preference to a standard PC-type Intel solution in order to ensure the system provided a scalable platform with plenty of capacity for future growth.  “Introducing new hardware also allowed us to undertake a single stage cut over, effectively turning off the previous systems and going live with the new system over a weekend.

“Some companies opt for a partial approach by putting in something like financials first.  We believed that that would be more risky than taking a one hit approach if we could manage it.  But it was important to get it right and we approached the cut over with military style preparation in our training and planning.

“We simulated exactly the environment that we would need to be in, working late nights and over the weekend, in order to bring the system up and then finally we did the cut-over itself during the weekend.”

From start to finish the implementation phase of the project took nine months.  As well as being completed on time it was also within the budget of $2.1m.  Paul Funnell credits this to the commitment of the Radiodetection’s headquarters staff, the role played by CCL as project facilitators and to IFS for being very easy to work with and very supportive of their product.

In considering the lessons for any company embarking on a similar venture, Paul Funnell stressed the need for a clear understanding of the purpose of the project and the potential risks involved.  Radiodetection succeeded because the company’s board of directors was united in its commitment and they knew exactly where they wanted to be and what it was going to cost.

“Having decided to go with a product that wasn’t our parent company’s first choice and in UDI supporting this decision there was every incentive for every member of our project team to fully commit and deliver.  Our managing director backed our judgement and gave us total commitment to the entire project, and we didn’t want to let anybody down.”

Benefits

In terms of measuring the financial benefits of the system, the expenditure on the system was justified on the basis of an £8m return over three years.

Paul Funnell explains that this estimate is based on some very conservative assumptions.  “Because the team wanted something that we were very comfortable to commit to.  The most important thing is that following a complete overhaul of our core business processes we are now back to business as usual.  And that means continuing to deliver growth of at least 15 percent annually.  Under these circumstances, measuring business benefits in real terms becomes pointless.  Our instincts tell us that things are getting better and you can see that costs are lower and it follows that our profitability will be improving.  We can also see that we are achieving inventory reductions.  What really matters however, is that we continue to return the bottom line figures for our shareholders.”

Paul Funnell concludes saying: “Naturally there have been some glitches but having said that, the number of open support call jobs has gone down progressively since the system went live and the steering group are quite satisfied with the results of the project.”

Work is continuing on the second phase of the project, covering a number of areas of additional functionality to enhance product development.  These include CAD system links and EDM (Electronic Document Management).  Radiodetection also plans to install IFS Front Office to provide CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SFA (Sales Force Automation).

Software

IFS eBusiness
IFS Financials
IFS Front Office
IFS Distribution
IFS Manufacturing
IFS Human Resources
IFS Maintenance
IFS Engineering
Accounting Rules
Quality Management
Document Management