A mid-market manufacturer needed to replace an end-of-life ERP but faced the industry default of an eighteen-month program. Stratenity compressed it to a six-month sequence by making two moves most programs defer: deciding fit-gap before kickoff so scope was locked, and running hypercare from day one rather than treating go-live as the finish line. The build hit hypercare on schedule, held customizations to eleven against a legacy count of over ninety, and kept order-to-cash running through cutover with no missed shipments. The compression came from deciding early, not from cutting corners.
An end-of-life system and an eighteen-month default
The manufacturer ran two plants and three distribution sites on an ERP that the vendor had put on an end-of-support path. The clock was real: security patches would stop, and the finance team was already stitching around modules the vendor no longer updated. The obvious response, quoted by two integrators, was a standard eighteen-month replatform program with a discovery phase, a build phase, several rounds of user acceptance testing, and a go-live at the far end.
Eighteen months was the problem, not the plan. Over that horizon the sponsoring CFO expected turnover on the project team, a budget that would drift, and a business that would keep changing under a frozen design. The legacy system carried more than ninety customizations accreted over a decade, most of them undocumented, and the default program treated each one as something to analyze during the project. The executive team had circled the same question for several quarters without resolving it: could a replatform be done fast enough to matter without the reckless compression that sinks these programs. The engagement was scoped to produce that sequence, and the decision it rested on, rather than another discovery phase. The CFO had lived through a prior replatform at a former employer that ran nineteen months and still went live with a broken month-end close, and the memory of that made speed and certainty the twin requirements. The engagement had to prove that compression and safety were not opposites.
Decide fit-gap first, run hypercare from day one
The compression came from moving two decisions to the front that most programs leave in the middle. The first was fit-gap. Instead of discovering requirements during the project, the team ran a focused pre-kickoff fit-gap against the standard configuration and forced a decision on every legacy customization before the clock started: adopt the standard, keep the customization with a written justification, or retire the process. That single decision collapsed ninety-plus customizations to eleven and locked scope before a single sprint began. The second was hypercare. Rather than treating go-live as the finish line, the team designed the support model, the escalation paths, and the daily hypercare standup on day one, so the organization was ready to operate the new system, not just to receive it.
With scope locked and support pre-designed, the build ran as a tight six-month sequence with a governance gate at each stage.
| Month | Phase | Decision locked | Governance gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-kickoff | Fit-gap and scope lock | Every customization: adopt, keep with justification, or retire | Sponsor signs the customization register; 90-plus cut to 11 |
| Month 1 | Core configuration | Standard config for finance, procurement, inventory | Config baselined and versioned, no in-flight scope changes |
| Months 2 to 3 | Data migration and the eleven builds | Data cleansing rules and the eleven approved customizations | Migration reconciled to legacy control totals, penny-accurate |
| Month 4 | Integrated testing | Order-to-cash and procure-to-pay run end to end | Test exit criteria signed by process owners, not just IT |
| Month 5 | Cutover rehearsal | Rehearsed cutover with a written rollback trigger | Two full dress rehearsals pass before go-live is authorized |
| Month 6 | Go-live and hypercare | Hypercare standup live from the first hour | Daily defect triage, severity-1 resolution inside the shift |
Deciding fit-gap before kickoff was the move that made the rest possible. Because scope was locked, the build had nothing to renegotiate mid-flight, which is where eighteen-month programs lose most of their time. And because hypercare was designed on day one, go-live was a transition into a running support model rather than a cliff edge, so the inevitable early defects were triaged inside a shift instead of escalating into a crisis. The team also kept a single decision log across all six months, so that when a question resurfaced about why a customization had been retired or a process changed, the answer was written down rather than relitigated. That log removed the slow re-argument that quietly stretches most programs.
What the six-month sequence delivered
- The program hit hypercare on schedule at month six, against the eighteen-month industry default the engagement had used as its baseline.
- Customizations dropped from more than ninety on the legacy system to eleven, each carrying a written justification, which cut both build time and future maintenance load.
- Order-to-cash and procure-to-pay ran through cutover with no missed shipments and no invoicing gap, because the two dress rehearsals surfaced the failure modes before go-live.
- Data migration reconciled to legacy control totals to the penny, so finance closed the first month on the new system without a manual bridge.
- Severity-1 defects in the first two weeks were resolved inside the shift they were raised, because the hypercare model was already running rather than being assembled under pressure.
What we would tell the next manufacturer
- Decide fit-gap before kickoff. Locking scope up front removes the mid-flight renegotiation that consumes most of the time in a long program.
- Treat every legacy customization as a decision, not a requirement. Forcing adopt, justify, or retire is what turned ninety-plus into eleven.
- Design hypercare on day one. Go-live is a transition into a support model, not a finish line, and building that model early is what keeps early defects from becoming a crisis.
- Rehearse cutover until it is boring. Two dress rehearsals with a written rollback trigger are cheaper than one live cutover that fails.
- Compression is discipline, not corner-cutting. The six months worked because decisions moved earlier, not because testing or governance moved out.
Before you start
- Run a pre-kickoff fit-gap against the standard configuration and force a documented adopt, justify, or retire decision on every legacy customization.
- Get the sponsor to sign the customization register so scope is locked before the first sprint, not negotiated during it.
- Reconcile every data migration to legacy control totals and set exit criteria that process owners, not just IT, must sign.
- Design the hypercare support model, escalation paths, and daily triage standup before go-live, and stand it up from the first hour.
- Schedule at least two full cutover rehearsals with a written rollback trigger, and treat passing them as the gate to authorize go-live.