The project has seven tracks. Four are functional: finance, supply chain management, manufacturing and order-to-cash. The other tracks are business intelligence reporting, technology and change management. Each track has several functional stakeholders?men and women responsible for overall progress. Each track also has one business process owner (BPO). "While the functional stakeholders work on the day-to-day, the BPOs work at a higher level," Wachs says. "For example, the finance BPO is talking with the CFO and controllers to design the business processes for that organization."

Celanese uses training principles from the Project Management Institute and the Six Sigma philosophy of "total quality management." OneSAP gets money in predetermined chunks, when the team hits its milestones. Risks to the project are scored every month (see "The Top Eight Risks to the OneSAP Project," this page). And project leaders vouch for what they’ve accomplished in regular validation sessions.

Over the course of December, Celanese held the blueprint sign-offs?when more than 100 BPOs, functional stakeholders and other key players signed ("in blood," Wachs says) a document that finalized the OneSAP blueprint. Planning ended there. System building began.

Like Wachs, both Carlson and Bockstedt say they are plenty confident that blueprinting and building this system isn’t hard, just laborious. And like Wachs, they fret more over cultural issues. They see two.

First, Celanese must fight its own consensus-building heritage. That is why the morning meetings moved at a no-nonsense pace. It was part of a conscious effort to change how Celanese operates.

"We want adequate analysis but not paralysis," Bockstedt says at lunch.

"We’re seeking consensus only when it’s appropriate," Carlson adds. "We are saying, What are the facts? Let’s move on. It hasn’t always been like this."

And Celanese hasn’t mastered it yet. Startlingly, it’s learned during the day that certain business units have fought for, and successfully kept, their SAP systems out of OneSAP’s scope. Seven of the 10 existing enterprise systems will be decommissioned, composing 90 percent of the business. But the U.S. corporate HR system, an outsourced HR system in Germany and a few other small systems staved off inclusion in OneSAP, for "legitimate business reasons," says one team member.

That could be prudent. But it also could be Celanese’s consensus culture creeping in.

The second cultural challenge is managing the massive pain Celanese will bring to its 12,000 employees. It’s Carlson’s job to manage that change. And as he sees it, there are three kinds of pain he’ll bring: "Jobs with new responsibilities. Jobs that change completely. And jobs that, yes, go away."