Enterprise Consulting Assists Merrill Technologies with their “One Merrill” Project and IFS Applications 10 Upgrade
Merrill Technologies knew they had a problem. Company growth had caused their use of IFS Applications 8.1 to become very awkward and inefficient. Different companies were created in IFS Applications unmethodically as they grew. This unplanned growth within the IFS Applications company structure often resulted in Customer Order back-and-forth’s between businesses to build a single end product. This resulted in large volumes of internal orders, accounting transactions and paperwork that added no net value. It also led to Merrill Technologies customers not always understanding that they were dealing with the same Merrill from order to delivery.
Merrill Technologies reached out to Enterprise Consulting for help (due to a long history of supporting Merrill’s IFS needs previously). Merrill Technologies and Enterprise Consulting agreed that a two-stage upgrade made the most sense to minimize disruption to ongoing work and keep the focus on the two major efforts: first, to centralize the overall Merrill Technology structure within IFS and second, upgrade to IFS Applications 10. The first stage, called “One Merrill”, was to essentially re-implement IFS Applications 8.1. The Company/Site structure was greatly simplified, old/bad data was purged, and critical processes were streamlined and automated where possible.
Once the One Merrill project was completed, Merrill was able to upgrade more effectively and easily to IFS Applications 10 with only new functionality changing instead of a full overhaul of the system. This plan reduced business risk and minimized over-taxing the project team for an extended period of time.
The end result of One Merrill was a very well-structured Merrill Technologies company within IFS Applications that produced greater overall efficiency and much greater customer satisfaction. The subsequent IFS Applications 10 Upgrade was a fairly simple “lift-and-shift” event with minimal Gap Training required. In addition, Merrill Technologies added some new IFS functional capabilities that IFS Applications 10 offered, allowing them to maximize their ROI of IFS Applications.
