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A cautionary case in point: In December, Sunrise's biggest competitor, Invacare Corp., warned that a botched Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) rollout cost it $30 million in lost sales for the quarter. Invacare, with revenue of $1.5 billion last year, went live with Oracle's order-to-cash system in the fall and, when it didn't work, suffered months of lost calls, delayed orders and a high number of product returns. Instead of growing revenue for the quarter at the expected 2%, sales declined more than 3% for the Elyria, Ohio, company, according to its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. Invacare, which had been turning on various Oracle 11i applications over four years, blamed its specific configuration of the order-to-cash piece rather than the vendor itself, according to press reports.
That's the kind of debacle Sunrise has tried to avoid as it's embarked on a carefully calibrated restructuring plan to standardize tools and processes.
"The risk to the business would be huge if we tried a big-bang approach," says John Kirkpatrick, vice president of global business systems. "It would be a disaster, no question. Others have tried to do it faster and failed, which had a big impact on how our management wanted to proceed."
Sunrise began its odyssey by redrawing the org chart so that IT management in different countries reported to the CIO instead of the local executive. Then the company moved to a centralized IT infrastructure, followed by an implementation of an enterprise product information management (EPIM) system so that engineers around the world could collaborate on designs. Next came a new e-commerce platform, which gave a unified look and feel to all the company's Web sites, and a data warehouse that serves as a single repository for a tightly focused product catalog.
Today -- five years after the company set about transforming itself -- the process continues with an ERP rollout that started in Mexico in 2004, hits the U.S. next summer and finishes up in Europe the year after.
"We're probably 75% to 80% there," says CEO Michael Hammes. "It takes a godawful long time, but the tough part is over. The tough part is the culture. The engineer sitting in Germany and the product manager in England have to understand that they are part of a global team."
"You don't flip a switch," adds Cooper, "and suddenly you're a global business."
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