It would definitely be interesting to hear the other side of this anecdote. My guess is that there's a lot of workarounds happening at the plant level that are being hidden.
It wasn't painless for everybody. In each region some good ol boy would resign the week before changeover. When they'd come in to do inventory some room or shed would be locked and nobody would have the key. They'd break the lock and whattaya know, the room would be empty. Supposed to be full of inventory.
I'm sure that's what the parent company thinks is happening. Whether that's what actually is happening at the plant level is another question. So is whether the improvement came with a hit to productivity or any other hidden cost. Obviously I know nothing specific about the company but speaking generally I've seen a lot of work arounds and inefficiencies in my day.
Doubters abound. Even now a decade later, folks meet this story with disbelief and doubt.
Worker: "Steve from Acme Co. needs a doohickey with a widget today but we don't have a SKU for that"
Boss: "Corporate takes 2 days to issue SKUs so just mark it as a doohickey and charge him 10% more for the widget"
Or maybe the customer has to go somewhere else because their turn around time can't be met.
>Doubters abound. Even now a decade later, folks meet this story with disbelief and doubt.
Because it's not our first time at the rodeo. If massive IT projects were this easy we'd all be doing it like that. They're generally not. Steam rolling the end user may have worked this time but other times it's ground the business to a halt because those individual plant level differences were there for a reason.
I agree they generally don't go well. Because they're run by weak Directors and VPs who are 2nd-guessing IT and getting in the way.
Plant differences are all well and good. But so is "IT not collapsing under 20 years of cruft". It costs something to bring all the plants in line. But it also profits e.g. they're still in business after 10 years.
Here's how the money part went. Once the tracking went online, they realized (region by region) they were losing $1M per month. 2nd month: losing $0.5M. Third month: break even. 4th month: 1M in the green.
Why? Because they now knew (for the first time) what the hell they were selling, how much to whom, and for what price. The VPs quickly became totally addicting to this instant-knowledge web API and used it to turn the business around.
They did an awful job. For example they scanned an item and then saw there were 10 items behind it and just multiplied the first item by 10 on the scanner (think of thumbdrives where the first one is a 512 MB drive and towards the back there may be a 256 MB drive). Afterwards, our inventory was worse than before. Corporate of course couldn't know this. I know your story is different, but they could still be getting duped.