Yet when Dunn returned stateside to take the more hands-on CIO job at Nestlé USA in 1997, she found that few of her recommendations had been acted on. "My team could name the standards, but the implementation rollout was at the whim of the businesses," she says during a recent interview in her sparsely decorated fourth floor office in Glendale. Dunn takes cigarette breaks at every possible opportunity and isn’t afraid to dress in a leopard-print skirt and blouse. At 47, she is a survivor who is refreshingly open about her mistakes and is respected throughout the company. Her staff speaks of her in almost reverential tones.

The Proposal: One Nestlé, Under SAP

Dunn’s arrival in spring 1997 came a few months after Nestlé USA Chairman and CEO Joe Weller coined the term One Nestlé to re-flect his goal of transforming the separate brands into one highly integrated company. In June, Dunn joined with executives in charge of finance, supply chain, distribution and purchasing to form a key stakeholders team and study what was right and wrong with the company. When the time came, the key stakeholders were initially allotted a little over two hours to present their findings to Weller and other top Nestlé officials.

The team balked at the time limit. "I told them that they would either throw me out in the first 15 minutes or they would cancel the rest of the day, and we would really have a great discussion," says Dick Ramage, Nestlé USA’s vice president of supply chain and a member of the team. "It took them an hour, but they canceled the rest of the day."

"I don’t think they knew how ugly it was," says Dunn, referring to the company’s condition. "We had nine different general ledgers and 28 points of customer entry. We had multiple purchasing systems. We had no clue how much volume we were doing with a particular vendor because every factory set up their own vendor masters and purchased on their own."

Soon the stakeholders team presented Weller with a blueprint for major changes they thought could be made in three to five years. While the cornerstone of the recommendation was an SAP package, Dunn says, "We made it very clear that this would be a business process reorganization and that you couldn’t do it without changing the way you did business. There was going to be pain involved, it was going to be a slow process, and this was not a software project."