Bockstedt, then part of the Ticona plastics division, was skeptical. "I figured we’d end up with three regional systems. But Karl convinced us. Without him, we wouldn’t be doing the project," he says.

The Approval Campaign

"There was no one event that made us go in this direction," Wachs says. "It was a process of research. There were 70 people building the business case. Never, ever start this if you don’t understand the risk. This is not a four-week decision cycle. It should take a year for approval."

In fact, approval came after about 11 months of stumping, in mid-2001. Then Wachs recruited his troika of project leaders, Carlson, Peters and Bockstedt, with whom he felt comfortable leaving the day-to-day operations. That freed up Wachs to deal with OneSAP at a higher level, which is best for the project, Carlson says. "Karl is not so much a detail person. In fact, he is not that at all." (Wachs himself says: "I’m not here to manage the project. If I am doing that, I am not doing my job.")

Instead, he’s thinking six months out, about progress reports to the board. He’s consulting peer companies. On this day, he has a major budget meeting with COO David Weidman.

Wachs also thinks about big-picture issues like burnout. "We’ll send the team away for two weeks at the end of the year. We’ll say, Go home, because we need 150 percent next year," he says.

If Wachs’s soft-spoken exterior hides a tenaciousness, it also reveals a great deal of confidence. He says ERP "is not rocket science anymore. It’s not easy, but it’s mechanical." He says nothing about this project keeps him up at night. He’s irked each of the several times he’s asked about the possibility of failure, as if the question is a non sequitur.

"I am not naive," he says, finally. "Proposing this to the board was the most difficult thing of my life." Wachs leans back in his chair. His feet are up, his hands clasped behind his head. "If this project goes bust, I will have serious issues." He laughs. "If I were you, I’d be asking, Is this guy confident or stupid?" He laughs again, harder.

11:20 AM Lunch with Cam Carlson and Russ Bockstedt
The Three Types of Pain

Over lunch, Carlson, the project director, and Bockstedt, the integration manager, lay out OneSAP’s structure.

They run the show with project manager Peters and BearingPoint’s Perroni. Bearing Point has 30 consultants on the job averaging 10 years of SAP experience. (The last time Celanese built an SAP system, it used 86 consultants and 30 employees. This time, it’s 70 employees to 30 consultants.)