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Restructuring Infrastructure
Other parts of the business needed restructuring as well. One of the most obvious needs was to coordinate engineering teams around the world. Sunrise deployed Enovia MatrixOne collaboration software to manage product lifecycles -- or what the company calls EPIM. Getting teams to use it was another matter. But after two teams designed the same part twice, the head of engineering put out the word that it wasn't going to happen again.
"We didn't have change management leaders," Cooper says. "We had to do it on a budget."
In 2003 the company's IT steering committee asked for a report evaluating whether business processes were best done at the local or global level. Commercial processes such as sales and marketing were deemed best handled locally, while most operations and financial processes were found to be global.
"The U.K. had a certain way to do shipping; the U.S. another," says Cooper. "Their differences weren't necessary." So Sunrise replaced nine different shipping systems with a single one from Irish vendor Precision Software.
At the same time, Sunrise needed to get on the Web. In 2000 a survey found that only one-third of the company's customers used email. Sunrise itself wasn't much more advanced. Only its U.S. and German operations had any sort of e-commerce platforms. Every country handled its own product launches and Web sites, all of which looked different.
"If you look at who were our worst customers, it was ourselves," Cooper says.
In 2001, Sunrise relaunched its Web presence, emphasizing its global brand but offering local customizing, such as pricing and language.
Turning the company into a single global enterprise also involved building a data warehouse. A single product, for example, might have 13 different SKUs -- a different one in every country. Cleaning up and standardizing the data was a huge project, but the results were clear: In Canada alone, the number of SKUs shrank from 200,000 to 60,000.
The data warehouse also gave management a new window on operations. For the first time, reports could be generated daily.
"Corporate headquarters didn't have a view of everything, just profit and loss and the margins," Cooper says. "We were never able to capitalize on products that were doing well in one particular country and optimizing the volume of supply chain."
That has since changed.
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