Technology Intervention Case Studies

 RSS 

 When the Removable Storage Systems (RSS) Division was spun out of Seagate as an independent entity, the arrangement required that the new organization stop using the Seagate Oracle financial and manufacturing systems as of January 1 2004. Leading up to this date RSS installed a new implementation of the Oracle applications that had been used when they were part of Seagate. Unfortunately, the cutover was problematic and the Director of IT resigned in early January.

The RSS organization designed and produced tape-based storage devices that were used by several PC manufacturers. The product was manufactured in the Far East and sent to various depots around the world for subsequent sale and delivery to customers. Revenues were in the range of $15-$25 million per quarter.

Unfortunately, the system failed so catastrophically that even though pallets of products moved to depots they could not be successfully received into the inventories of the depots and therefore no products were available for customer shipments. 

The first step in the intervention was to meet with various staff members who were all part of the implementation team. These meetings had two purposes: one clear and one hidden. The clear purpose of each meeting was to gather as much information about the way the systems and its processes were supposed to work, to gather the opinions of the participants as to what were the fundamental problems and what needed to be done. The hidden reason was to conduct a quick assessment of the capabilities of each of the members of the organization.

Fortunately there was one individual within the IT organization who really understood all aspects of the system and how the various processes were connected. His name was Kiran Gudetti and he had been with the company for well over a year. Unfortunately the system issues were so severe it became clear that the path to fix both the current crises and the longer term processing issues would fall to Kiran. This meant that the relationship between me, the CEO, Howard Matthews, and Kiran needed to be quickly established and that Kiran needed to understand that if he helped us through this situation, he would be rewarded.

Fortunately, there were members of the other business groups that were also very knowledgeable about the way the company operated and were cooperative and not judgmental. The most noteworthy member of this group was Patricia Warble. Her involvement was especially important because the level of tension in the manufacturing and logistics organization was so high that they often boiled over into personal attacks on the IT staff.

Within a couple of weeks we began conducting daily conference calls beginning at 5:00 Pacific time so that we could include members of our production management group in the Far East.

As we sorted through the issues we rigorously documented each problem and just as rigorously documented each resolution. We captured our progress (or lack thereof) by graphing the difference between the two (newly opened minus the newly closed.) For the first several weeks after I arrived the graph clearly showed that each day we were losing ground in that more problems were being discovered than were being solved. The only good news in this period was that we were able to solve some of the more important issues and we began to successfully move product. It turns out that one of the fundamental reasons that shipments could not be received into the depots was that the receiving system's modules were expecting serial numbers for each of the devices on a pallet and the shipping settings did not attach serial numbers to the electronic shipping documents. This one discovery allowed us to begin to successfully ship and receive product into the depots and subsequently to ship products to customers. However, the huge number of pallets that were already in the system without serial numbers had to be handled one pallet and one shipping unit at a time with a tremendous amount of manual effort. 

• Assessed all of the IT team members
• Identified Kiran Gudetti as critical to the solution and established relationships of trust and respect among Kiran, Howard and me.
• Enlist “friendly” member of other business units to focus on the solutions
• Conduct daily global calls to track all aspects of the failures of the implementation

• The business unit personnel that were needed to ensure a successful implementation were not adequately involved

The President had been informed by IT management that although not all test scripts had been executed in the “conference room pilot,” the system was “mostly ready.” [In fact less than 30% of the finance-related test scripts had been executed.]