A $4B Manufacturer's Three-Year Digital Overhaul, in Its CIO's Own Words
An inside account of replatforming a 30-year-old ERP estate without stopping the factory floor.
This is a first-person account from the CIO of a four-billion-dollar industrial manufacturer, describing a three-year programme to modernise everything from the shop floor to the finance department. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Where we started
"When I arrived, we had forty-two plants running seven different versions of our planning software. Nobody could tell me our true inventory position on any given day. The board had approved a digital programme, but nobody had defined what done would look like."
The first year
"We spent most of the first year on foundations that nobody outside IT could see: a single network, a modern identity system, a common data platform. It was the least popular year of my career. Every quarter someone asked where the digital transformation was."
“If I had started with the shiny projects, we would have built them on sand.”
The second year
"Once the foundations were in, things accelerated. We rolled out a standard manufacturing execution system plant by plant. Each site had a local champion, and we didn't move to the next plant until the previous one was performing better than before."
- Unplanned downtime fell in every plant that completed the rollout
- Inventory accuracy improved enough to release significant working capital
- Plant managers began asking to go earlier in the schedule
The third year
"By the third year, the conversation changed. The business started bringing us problems instead of us selling them projects. That, more than any metric, is how I knew the transformation had worked."
What I'd tell other CIOs
"Protect the foundation work, find champions in the business, and measure success in business terms from the very first day."