Client Context
Manufacturing, Regional Victoria, with two production sites and one distribution centre. ~210 staff, $62M annual revenue. The client is anonymised to protect commercial sensitivity, but the operational facts and quantified outcomes below are reported as they were measured.
The Challenge
A family-owned manufacturer in regional Victoria with $62M revenue had spent $400k on an ERP migration that stalled 18 months in. The implementation partner had overpromised on timelines and underestimated the complexity of integrating with existing shop-floor systems. Staff were running parallel processes in the old and new systems, creating data integrity issues and significant operational overhead.
The implementation partner had been replaced once already and the second partner had quietly stopped attending steering committee meetings two months before the engagement began. Three of the four major customers had reported invoice errors traceable to the parallel-system workaround. The CFO was running month-end with a hand-built reconciliation spreadsheet that took 12 days to close — up from 7 days before the migration started. The board was within weeks of writing off the entire investment, and the CEO had floated reverting to the legacy system entirely. Internal change-fatigue was severe; the same staff had been told three times that the new system would be live "next quarter".
Our Approach
Engaged under our Project Rescue framework. Conducted a 2-week rapid assessment to determine what was salvageable. Found that approximately 60% of the configuration work was sound but the data migration approach and integration layer needed to be rebuilt. Renegotiated the vendor contract, brought in a specialist integration partner, and established weekly governance with the CEO and CFO.
The first decision was the most important: which 40% of work to throw away. We ran a structured technical review against three salvage criteria — does it match the documented business process, can it be tested end-to-end, and is the team confident enough in it to defend it to the auditor. The configuration cleared all three. The data migration approach failed two of the three. The integration layer to the shop-floor scheduling system failed all three and was scrapped entirely. We then rebuilt the integration layer with a specialist partner, paid against four contractual milestones rather than a single fixed-price contract, and migrated data in three rehearsed cutover dress-rehearsals before the live event. The CEO chaired the weekly steering committee personally for the duration of the rescue, which we made a non-negotiable condition of the engagement.
The Outcome
Rescued approximately $240k of the original investment. Completed the migration in 4 months from our engagement start. Annual operational savings of $180k through automated workflows that replaced manual processes. The finance team went from a 12-day month-end close to 5 days.
Beyond the financial recovery, the migration itself unlocked operational improvements that the original business case had assumed but never delivered. Production scheduling moved from a daily standup with paper printouts to live dashboards on the shop floor, cutting changeover time on the larger production line by 22%. The CFO's month-end shortened from 12 days to 5, with the bulk of the saving coming from automated three-way matching that replaced manual invoice reconciliation. Customer invoice errors fell from a peak of 14 per month back to the pre-migration baseline of 1 to 2 per month within the first quarter post-cutover. The CEO retained the steering-committee discipline as a permanent feature of any major investment over $250k.
“We brought them in to rescue a stalled ERP migration. The previous consultants had burned through $400k with nothing to show for it. The team assessed what was salvageable, rebuilt the project plan, and got us live in four months.”
Michael W., CFO
What This Means for Similar Businesses
For mid-market manufacturers running stalled ERP implementations, the temptation to cut losses and revert to the legacy system is usually a worse decision than it looks, because the legacy system was already failing the business or the migration would not have been started. The right diagnosis is rarely "everything is broken"; it is usually that two or three specific work-streams are broken and the rest is salvageable. Independent assessment, milestone-based renegotiation, and a CEO who chairs the steering committee personally are the three signals that separate rescues that work from rescues that drag on.
How We Would Approach Your Situation
If you are seeing similar symptoms — stalled transformations, unreliable platforms, ballooning vendor costs, or a board that has lost faith — the first step is a rapid diagnostic. We run a structured two-week assessment that surfaces the real root causes behind what your team has been telling you. From there we build a phased roadmap your CFO will fund and your engineers can actually ship, with clear milestones and measurable exit criteria.
Every engagement ends with you owning the playbook, the governance artefacts, and the relationships with key vendors. We are not building dependency. We are building the technology capability your organisation needs to keep compounding value long after we step back. Read more about how we approach engagements like this on our Project Rescue page, or take the Tech Health Check to surface where your own organisation sits.