GlobalManufacturingSuite ​​​​​​​COE ​​​​​​​

So... we are past first set of improvements to the CORE Model. To deliver them in second version and rollout to next 1-2-3-X plants (wave one of rollouts – see post #4 here on overall waves and capitalization approach), you’ve had to trim down requested scope to bare minimum and squeeze only necessary and most beneficial functional enhancements. You still have a significant backlog of requests, which is growing by every day the new sites are using the solution ad see more potential benefit in it.

What to do next?

Or maybe we should rephrase … when is the time to deliver them? How fast to proceed with rollouts vs how fast to proceed with enhancements? These are again complex topics, which we will tackle in couple of next articles.

Let us get back to the original picture on global approach

If you have many sites, organizationally you cannot do a “big bang”. It is impossible that all sites receive the solution at the very same moment in time. This is neither safe nor you have enough internal resources to manage and drive such change. So always, you will have waves (phases, sequence, whatever you will call it). A single wave can have one or more plants in it. The rollout of CORE Model will take less and less time with every subsequent site (after initial pilot ones) and stabilize on some minimum effort / duration (depending on the breadth of scope and your sites complexity). At that time, you will have estimate “how long it will take until everyone is on CORE Model which takes into account not only workload, but your organizational change readiness and your management capacity.

Now, if we are talking many sites (15, 20, and more…), and considering going site-by-site, typically, the timeline will not look satisfactory. At the same time, the goal was to have all sites on CORE Model in … let’s say maximum 3 years. What to do?

With matured and tested CORE Model, Rollout Toolkit and Rollout Team that had its first battles, you will be able to...

Start doing things in parallel

A wave of plants will be processed together, not one by one. By together we mean, when WaveA_Site1 will be running workshops, WaveA_Site2&3 will be preparing internally for those. When WaveA_Site1 will be doing post-workshop tasks and Go-Live preparation, the team running workshops can move to WaveA_Site2 etc. There is certain amount of parallel operations that is possible to be done. You need to consider though that, size of wave (#sites in it) will depend on your organization capabilities to drive change, readiness of sites etc. and people you can spare from their main daily job to assist the rollout.

You could even think of making parallel waves with couple of deployment teams working with different sets of sites at the same time. The only assumption here would be – no changes to CORE Model while anyone is rolling out in parallel. You do not want to run into couple of CORE Models.

In overall, depending on the size of your organization, readiness of sites and impact on production a rollout may have, the most common approach is to run single wave of rollouts, with 1-3 sites in wave.

We have number of examples that resulted in 20+ sites running new solution in less than 3 years from the day 1 of the project (including CORE Model V1 configuration). That means a successful go-live of a site every month (during rollout period).

Have a look here, on one of examples, where during one of our events in China, Christian Reventlov of Vestas outlined what they achieved.

Keep in mind that many factors can affect your timelines.

Primarily it will be

• capability to drive internal change management
• availability of your global and site teams.

You will be also impacted by decision whether you want to do rollouts with internal resources (own team) or with an experienced SI organization. The latter for sure will have more resources and capability to provide you with more than one rollout team to work in parallel.

In terms of structure of your own teams, especially the global competence center, we will focus on those topics in next articles, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, what are your lessons learned or thought on the rollout timelines and speed matters? Please share in comments below this article.