IFS 9 Integration Project Supporting the Merger of Unimin and Fairmont Santrol
Covia Corporation was formed as the merger of two sand mining businesses, Unimin and Fairmont Santrol. One of Covia’s immediate priorities was to integrate their operations onto one common ERP system, setting an aggressive schedule to complete the integration within 10 months. Unimin had recently implemented IFS applications version 9 and the decision was made to use IFS to support the new entity as well as all Fairmont facilities. In addition to adding new operating facilities to IFS, Covia decided to re-organize their Finance and customer service functions which added change management complexity to the integration.
Approach
Covia had a well-planned project organization including an executive steering team, a project management office, and an integration team consisting of pairs of business process owners (pairing 1 BPO from Unimin with 1 BPO from Fairmont) for all of the major functional areas. Flexpro joined Covia’s PMO to participate in overall leadership of the project and to specifically lead the functional BPO teams and change management aspects of the project. This included configuration and setup of the system, data migration and validation, user acceptance testing and user training.
A significant challenge of the integration was managing task deliverables and resources over a multi-wave implementation approach, with the go-live for each wave separated by only 1 month. Another key challenge was the validation and testing of the setups and data migration of items, BOMs, routings, customers and pricing. To complete this validation hundreds of test orders were entered and processed through all functional workflows including order processing, manufacturing, shipping, and accounting.
Outcomes
Covia was able to complete its full integration plan on schedule and the Covia leadership team was highly satisfied with the overall results. Ten new manufacturing facilities were successfully integrated to IFS over 6 separate waves. In addition, the reorganization of the Finance and Customer Service functions were supported along with training for approximately 150 new users.