Despite that warning, it would later become apparent that neither Weller nor the key stakeholders really understood the degree to which the Best project would change the business processes at Nestlé or the amount of pain it would cause. "They still thought that it was just about software," Dunn says.

By October 1997, a team of 50 top business executives and 10 senior IT professionals had been assembled to implement the SAP project. The team’s goal was to come up with a set of best practices that would become common work procedures for every Nestlé division. All the divisional functions?manufacturing, purchasing, accounting and sales?would have to give up their old approaches and accept the new pan-Nestlé way.

On the technical side, a smaller team spent 18 months examining every bit of item data in each division in order to implement a common structure across the company. From now on, vanilla would be code 1234 in every division. The SAP system would be customized around the uniform business processes. In the case of the supply chain, the team decided not to use SAP because the ERP company’s supply chain module, Ad-vanced Planner and Optimizer or APO, was brand-new and therefore risky. Instead, Nestlé turned to Manugistics?at that time an SAP partner. Manugistics’ supply chain module followed all the SAP standards and could easily be integrated.

By March 1998 the key stakeholders had a plan in place. Nestlé would implement five SAP modules?purchasing, financials, sales and distribution, accounts payable and accounts receivable?and the Manugistics’ supply chain module. Each would be deployed across every Nestlé division. For instance, the purchasing group for confections would follow the same best practices and data as the purchasing group for beverages.

Development work began in July 1998. The deadline for four of the modules was Y2K. The new systems would have to double as code fixes and be in place for the millennial change. Nestlé USA made the deadline. But its haste created almost as many problems as it solved.

The Process: Nestlé’s Crunch

Even before three of the SAP and the Manugistics modules were rolled out in late 1999, there was rebellion in the ranks. Much of the employee resistance could be traced to a mistake that dated back to the project’s inception: None of the groups that were going to be directly affected by the new processes and systems were represented on the key stakeholders team. Consequently, Dunn says, "We were always surprising [the heads of sales and the divisions] because we would bring something up to the executive steering committee that they weren’t privy to." Dunn calls that her near fatal mistake.