First Go-Live entirely managed remotely for Alfa Sistemi and illycaffè: how to manage an unexpected emergency in an international Roll-out Project

The recent go-live of the roll-out of the Oracle JDE E1 ERP system in illycaffé‘s UK branch was not only the 73rd international project completed by our team with the satisfaction of the customer and within the agreed time and cost, demonstrating a solid, reliable and refined methodology, but it was also a perfect example of Project Resilience.

Due to the lockdown imposed by the Covid-19 emergency, it was in fact the first go-live to be managed entirely remotely. The constraints dictated by a contingent situation as sudden and unpredictable as ever have required that project methodology and management should be rethought and evolve quickly adapting them to a new model very different from the previous ones. The massive use of collaboration tools, video conferencing and unified communication has made it possible to remotely manage the final stages of the project, such as training sessions or post-live user support.

Digital solutions therefore constituted a fundamental, enabling component of the project, but the final result was achieved mainly thanks to an extended team, illycaffè and Alfa Sistemi, which always proved to be cohesive and motivated to achieve the goal.

Besides representing a new piece of our long-lasting collaboration with illycaffé, this experience could also be a useful paradigm for the near future, for an alternative way of seeing, evaluating and living new projects.

And now: what’s next?

“A remote-controlled JDE go-live? Until a few months ago we would not have thought it possible, especially in the context of an international project with an already challenging work plan, but now we can say that, together, we have succeeded. The key factors of this result are to be found in the solid foundations laid in the process analysis and TO-BE model definition phase, in a strongly cohesive team and in a proven methodology. More generally, this experience has shown us how collaboration technologies can enable alternative design methods, which we will certainly consider as an opportunity in the future.” – Stefano Giordano, Project Leader at  illycaffè S.p.A.