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Chapter 4 • Development Life Cycle 115

and streamlined business processes. Like any other ERP project, however, ERP-1 went
significantly over budget and over time.
The second company, ExploreCO, is an oil and gas exploration and production
company in southwest Australia. ExploreCO is an affiliate of OilCO. The company is
involved in offshore gas and oil exploration and production. When OilCO acquired another
oil exploration company that had an operational resource system it became the ExploreCO
operational system; however, there was substantial dissatisfaction with this system within
the ExploreCO system. ExploreCO had to decide either to rework and upgrade the existing
system or to replace it. They chose a new system and conducted a feasibility analysis
of several ERP systems. For budgetary reasons and, because it suited their exploration
business, they decided to implement an ERP system (referred to here as ERP-2). The
budget and project scope were considerably more modest than the OilCO implementation,
so they planned to implement and “Go Live” with the system in 11 months.
Documentation on the existing system indicated that an understanding of the require-
ments was already advanced, but they took the opportunity to renew and reengineer the
system, particularly given the level of dissatisfaction with the old system. Moreover, they
needed to align the new system (ERP-2) with OilCO’s existing ERP (ERP-1). The implemen-
tation project was driven by OilCO’s head office, which performed cost analysis, set the scope,
made recommendations, and provided leadership on the steering committee. System goals
were set via performance indicators. For example, the indicators included the number of check
runs in a given period, a measured reduction in off-system payments, and a reduction in suppli-
ers from 6,000 to 600. Given the lessons learned in the OilCO implementation, the steering
committee insisted that the best people be released full time for the life of the project and a
“project champion” (that was the official title) placed on the steering committee.
The project was completed on time and on budget and was described by the highly
experienced project manager as the “easiest implementation” he had “ever been involved in”
(from an interview with the project manager in December, 1999). The business benefits of the
ERP-2 system were significant. These include (1) a measured reduction in manual processes,
manual transactions, and the number of suppliers, which has led to improved procurement
and inventory systems; (2) streamlined, real-time accounting systems; (3) a reengineering of
processes that involved a devolution of responsibility back into the hands of the operators;
and (4) improved time accounting (to 15-minute intervals). This last benefit has been particu-
larly important since this company had many joint ventures. The critical success factors
(CSFs; Table 4-5), identified in ERP-1, were used to augment the second project.
Tabular summary of the importance of each CSF is then presented in Tables 4-6
and 4-7. Table 4-6 represents the OilCO case study findings and Table 4-7 the
ExploreCO findings. The tables show the CSFs in a particular phase. The number of dots
in each cell represents the strength of the participants’ consensus that that particular CSF
was necessary in that phase. Four dots indicate that the particular CSF was considered to
be of major importance in that phase of the PPM. Three dots indicate that the CSFs were
considered very important. Two dots indicate that the CSFs were considered important.
One dot indicates that the CSFs were considered to be of minor importance. No dots
indicates that the CSFs were considered to be unimportant. We have not included “smaller
scope” as a CSF in Table 4-7 because one implementation was clearly large in scope and
the other smaller in scope.