Michael Del Priore's team spent the past 18 months developing and implementing a global ERP system and data warehouse that supports 95% of the operations at his company, Church & Dwight.
It went live in Canada on Oct. 3 and in the U.S. on Jan. 3; it will go live in Mexico and Europe in the first half of this year.
"That's certainly been our biggest, most critical project. It required upgrading or enhancing pretty much every major system to work with it, and we upgraded pretty much all our infrastructure as well," says Del Priore, 49, vice president and global CIO at the Princeton, N.J.-based maker of household cleaning and personal care products.
Del Priore says a project that size had "exponentially increased" levels of risk, but he was confident in how he and his team managed it, with synchronized and coordinated project plans, war rooms or testing, and team members working jointly when the systems went live.
Mike Esch, vice president of manufacturing, who partnered with Del Priore on the SAP ERP initiative, says his colleague provided the needed leadership: "We needed someone who had a clear vision of systems, who knows how they could work in the 21st century, who was calm and collected and could articulate that decision throughout the organization from the upper echelons all the way down. But we also needed someone who could roll up his sleeves and get work done, and Michael could do that.
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