Meeting Information
ERP System Implementation: Doing It Right
Date:
Tuesday February 1, 2022
Time:
8:30am - 10:00am US/Pacific GMT-8:00
Location:
ZOOM MEETING

TIME ZONE: US PST

You must register on The FENG website by the day before the meeting, noon, to receive the Zoom instructions.

You will be sent the Zoom link at approximately 5:00 p.m. the day before the meeting.

If you miss the deadline or do not receive the link (make sure you check your SPAM folder), please contact:

Dan Ruchman
San Diego Chapter Chair
[email protected]
Directions:

Meeting capacity:

300

Suggested Donation:

Agenda:

Topic: ERP System Implementation: Doing It Right

Speaker: Dan Chaffer, Vice President of Information Technology at Sound United

CPE Credits: 1.0 hours

Presentation:
E R P -- Enterprise Resource Planning system. We've all heard the term. Many companies have them. Many of us in the FENG have overseen their implementation... or the cleanup after a failed implementation. Some of us may be in the midst of an implementation; some of us are planning to implement an ERP solution in the not too distant future; some of us don't have it on the immediate horizon, but anticipate doing one some day.

Do they work? Many of them do, and they have the potential to make many things better in a company... but there are also some fascinating and scary statistics to answer that question.

Several years ago, the following facts emerged:
- 80% of companies implementing ERPs lacked the internal capability to deliver on their planned ERP implementations
- 90% of implementing companies lacked any strategy for integrating multiple cloud applications
- ERP projects are costing on average 6.5% of company revenues
- The average ERP project overran its planned costs by 57% -- and similarly overran its project schedule.

This phenomenon is not new. Just a few years ago, in surveying CFOs and CIOs, the following statistics emerged, for companies under $300M in size to over $1 billion:
- Over half of ERP implementation projects ran over budget.
- Over 60% of ERP projects took more than the scheduled amount of time to be completed.
- More dramatic than the above, only 22% of implementations realized even 80% of the planned benefits.
- Over 60% of the companies received less than HALF of their expected benefits of implementation.
- Over 14% of respondents couldn't say if they got benefits -- because they never did a business case.

Those are some stunning numbers.

Every financial executive is faced with the challenge of interpreting and delivering accurate, timely, and relevant operational reports. If information is late, inaccurate, insufficient or unavailable, due to poorly functioning or disparate systems, it can lead to delayed decisions or, worse, timely but misguided decisions. Faced with inadequate or inefficient access to company-wide data and KPIs, financial executives need to consider whether, and then how, to implement an effective ERP system.

Dan Chaffer will describe the critical challenges you must face in selecting and implementing the right business management systems for your company, discuss the factors involved in organizing the project, and lay out the issues to be addressed to ensure that your ERP implementation drives your company to success -- and not to one of the above failure statistics.

Attendees at this meeting will receive actionable concepts and steps for assessing their business system requirements, will hear discussion of how to avoid some classic pitfalls, and will learn how to implement a winning system that meets the company's needs. It will include the following key factors that will lead to a successful implementation:
- Knowing What You Need – Assess critical requirements and focus on what the end result needs to look like.
- Cloud vs. On-Premise – What are the key factors you must consider when assessing which is right for you?
- Customizations vs. Out-of-the-Box Functionality – What are the pros and cons of each.
- Resource Requirements – Budgeting for a new system: people, time and costs.
- Risk Assessment – Uncover and identify the risks that can make or break your success, including organizational, financial, operational and regulatory.
- Managing It All -- Avoiding the traps, and bringing it home successfully.

At the end of this session, you should have a clear understanding of how to run a successful ERP system implementation, and a better appreciation for how to best run ANY system implementation.

NOTE: As this topic spans both Finance and IT, please feel free to bring as your guest your CIO or any colleague from your company's IT department, to enhance his or her knowledge and value to your company -- and to enrich the discussion in the meeting.

About our Speaker
Dan Chaffer is currently Vice President of Information Technology at Sound United, a consumer audio manufacturer based in Carlsbad. While his current IT role is responsible for ERP, business intelligence and supply chain planning, he ‘grew up’ on the Finance side of the house. Before moving over to IT, he had roles as Controller, Treasurer and Director of FP&A. His transition to full-time IT began in earnest with an Oracle implementation at a Bay Area software company, where he acted as business architect and analyst on the implementation team. After that initial effort, he led the global expansion of Oracle at Qualcomm, then worked as a consultant on various Oracle projects for clients that included Expedia, Genalyte and Alphatec Spine.

The work for Alphatec directly led to his current role at Sound United, where in 2018 he was brought in to take over a Microsoft NAV implementation that had run into issues. Since joining Sound United, his responsibilities have grown to include other business applications, including Rapid Response supply chain planning, OneStream consolidations and the Atlassian project tools Jira & Confluence. He built a Global Business Intelligence function that pulls together data from four separate ERPs, as well as other data sources, into an Enterprise Data Warehouse, with reporting centralized on Microsoft Power BI. In the near future, he’ll be leading the effort to migrate from MS NAV into SAP, with the project to consolidate the remaining SAP instances into a single global ERP to follow.

In his work at Qualcomm, Dan led a global rollout team that expanded the company's Oracle ERP footprint in ways that many of our members with international experience can relate to: they went from a single US Dollar denominated ledger, to over 60 Country/Currency combinations and 95 additional legal entities. He also was the lead Finance manager on multiple acquisition integrations and a significant divestiture during the same period.

Dan has his BA in business administration and finance, as well as his MBA in finance -- which he earned while working fulltime -- from San Diego State University.

Dan’s practical accounting approach to system implementations, and his years of experience implementing financial software, give him a unique ability to communicate effectively with both business executives and technical staff alike.

To Attend:
Meetings are for members, prospective members and invited guests only. For non-members, RSVP is required by writing to chapter chair, Dan Ruchman at [email protected]. Please include a one or two sentence description of who you are, and your interest in attending the meeting. Thank you.

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CPE Credits: 1.0 hours
Reminder for those members maintaining their professional certifications - we offer the documentation for Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits for our speaker presentations. For those members interested in this, you may complete the appropriate forms, which we'll have available at the meeting.

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Zoom Screen: Make sure your First and Last Name appear on your screen.

For meeting information, please contact:

Dan Ruchman

(585) 721-7843
Attendees
95
Please login/register in order to RSVP and see the participants list.