You are Marisol Achával-Rendón, head of business processes at Helio Verde Beverages, Costaria's largest soft-drinks bottler. You have five days to write the blueprint for an 8-million-peso enterprise system, and its first line is due this morning: how much of that money goes to the data before a single module goes live.
The situation
Helio Verde has 1,600 employees, two bottling plants and about 44% of the country's carbonated soft-drink volume, all in a single legal entity. It runs on four systems: an in-house order application from the late 2000s, a manufacturing and inventory package from 2014, the finance ledger from 2016 and payroll from 2019. They pass data through nightly batch files, spreadsheet exports and re-keying by hand, and each keeps its own version of customers, vendors and materials.
The memo from the chief operating officer, Gonzalo Iturbe-Saldías, was blunt: the month-end close takes nine days, inventory is wrong by about 8%, and salespeople sell on credit with a view of the customer's balance that can be 48 hours old. Three finance analysts spend most of each week reconciling the systems, and profitability by product, customer, channel and week takes a fortnight of spreadsheets.
The board approved 8 million Costarian pesos (CO$). The integrator has priced a single cutover after 14 months or a phased roll-out over 24, and nobody has yet set how much goes to training and adoption. The commercial director wants to go live as soon as possible; the integrator's partner, whose firm bills more under the longer plan, argues for staying close to the standard. Iturbe-Saldías's first question is how much to put into master data, starting three months before the programme: 2% (CO$ 160,000), 8% (CO$ 640,000) or 20% (CO$ 1.6 million). On May 21 he will ask the board to sign the contract.