Air Products, a £3.6bn-turnover industrial gases firm,
has nearly completed an application retirement programme that is
vital to its global enterprise resource planning
overhaul.
The application retirement programme underpinned the finance
model for the ERP roll-out by freeing up resources previously used
to support legacy applications.
This programme centres on managing old technologies, rather than
giving staff new IT systems, but is still essential to the success
of Air Products' implementation of SAP's business applications and
business re-engineering, which started in 2001.
According to Gillian Berg, enterprise archiving manager at Air
Products, these factors meant communication and persuasion were
vital ingredients for the IT team running the programme.
Access to legacy data was also part of corporate due diligence,
meeting the legal, taxation and health and safety requirements.
Berg said those in charge of the programme therefore had to
engage with a diverse group of involved parties, including lawyers,
tax experts and industrial scientists, as well as keeping on top of
the technology challenge.
"It was not easy; it took a fairly long time to persuade people
to become involved," she said.
"A lot of people did not understand why we were doing this. We
had to grab the attention of people at the top to make sure the
message cascaded down."
Legacy applications, some of which dated back to the 1970s, were
running on HP mainframe systems and IBM AS/400 mid-range
servers.
Air Products worked with Open Text, an enterprise content
management consultancy, to implement an ECM archiving system. It
also stored formatted SAP reports and scanned documents from SAP
systems belonging to joint venture partners and acquisitions.
Berg's team is completing the second cycle of application
retirement and will bring the lessons learned to bear in the final
stage of the programme, which starts later this year.
"Throughout the programme we have concentrated on maintaining
regular communication - we have had to keep reinforcing the
message. We also had to celebrate our achievements, as it is not
easy to keep people interested in a project like this," she
said.