Celanese officially declines to say how much OneSAP will cost. Wachs told CIO in a previous interview that it will cost between $100,000 and $200,000 per day. A project manager let slip a figure of $60 million. ERP experts say that’s a reasonable number. Celanese believes OneSAP will pay for itself two years after it’s fully deployed.

The meeting moves efficiently through a litany of status reports, using a red, yellow, green system for marking progress on different elements of the project. While certain aspects such as the supply chain planning group are in yellow (between two and five days behind), OneSAP as a whole is in green. It is about 1 percent, or less than two days, behind schedule.

The meeting is marked by German, Indian, British and Texan accents speaking the languages of SAP, Six Sigma, project management and Celanese.

One acronym, SCEM, doesn’t whiz by. When it’s brought up, the meeting takes on a concerned tone. SCEM, Supply Chain Event Management, is a new ERP feature from SAP?still in beta development?that is meant to help a company like Celanese better manage its supply chain. The ICE (interfaces, conversions, enhancements) group at Celanese needs the vendor’s SCEM beta code more or less today.

"What can easily drive us into red," the project manager who needs SCEM says, "is not having that software."

ERP, a Two-Track Mind-Set

One way to look at major ERP projects is as if they are railroad tracks. There are two rails to follow, a technical one and a cultural one, which are tied together. There’s a sense at Celanese that the technical rail?the code, interfaces, documentation?is easy. Even building OneSAP doesn’t much worry Wachs, or anyone else in the room. Culturally, though, OneSAP is the hardest project in the world.

That’s because Celanese has traditionally operated as a holding company, letting its five business units run themselves. Over time, they developed a fierce independence, which made it hard for Celanese corporate to make decisions for the whole company. Cam Carlson, the project director, will say twice today: "Historically, Celanese’s culture has not been so good at decision making." Over time, the staff says, Celanese earned its reputation for building consensus and avoiding decisions. (Under current project management wisdom forwarded by gurus like Patrick Lencioni, consensus is bad. It means you’re trying to placate everyone; it leads to mediocrity.)

OneSAP is meant to change all of that?to get the five businesses sharing processes and systems while accepting that they are accountable to Celanese as a whole. "The real project is, we’re trying to become one company, and this is how we’re doing it," says OneSAP Integration Manager Russ Bockstedt.