Challenges and Lessons Learned From Implementing New Systems

At the November 2024 CxO Series, Brendan Clark, CIO of Commercial Cold Holdings (CCH) in Cape Town shared the incredible journey that CCH has undertaken over the past 21 months.

The Challenge in Summary:

Unlike many organizations that can spread their target of architecture improvement and transformation over a 3 to 5-year journey, CCH needs to achieve significant and large-scale change in a 2-to-3-year period. The journey initially comprised of executing a transition of an acquired business (CCS Logistics) from the Oceana Group as well as planning the consolidation of a second purchased business (Sequence Logistics) onto a shared technology platform of scale envisioned by the group. 

Following a RFP process supported by logistics industry experts, this rapid transformation is planned and executed while each of the individual businesses continues to grow and evolve while supporting additional business acquisitions within the CCH group.

An assessment of the existing operations and infrastructure revealed that this was not a typical brownfield improvement project. There was simply too much legacy that needed to be upgraded thus, a new platform is being implemented that is scalable across the group. Key principles in this greenfield opportunity include a ‘cloud first’ approach and continual optimization of suppliers to ensure local and regional support. Your investment should enhance accuracy, streamline data capturing processes, improving traceability and reporting and leverage smarter data to make informed decisions swiftly. Brendan noted that one of the key lessons learned so far is that companies must ensure that suppliers and service providers understand the importance of meeting deadlines and the impact on all involved if deadlines are not met. 

The transition is currently progressing well, with a new group core network infrastructure, Azure & Oracle Cloud hosting and services platform, Warehouse Management System (WMS) and ERP implementation that form the backbone of the new CCH Group platform in place and being rolled out across the group. These core products are further supplemented by several other leading cloud-based toolsets including PowerBI, Flowgear. An early transition win has been the implementation of the PaySpace cloud HR platform as well as the move to a common time and attendance solution for the group.

Large-scale projects always come with their own set of challenges and lessons learned. Brendan shared the following with attendees.

Greenfields: Designing platforms from scratch requires a lot of hands and careful consideration. There is way more to be done than you think, and it takes way more time to execute than you think.

Multicloud: High complexity and interdependency with few experienced partners and out-of-the-box solutions ready to go.

Partners: Choose your partners carefully. It’s a long journey, so ‘try before you buy’ and have alternative partner options. Foreign world class solutions are challenging and expensive to support locally. Factor that carefully into overall TCO decision making. 

Programme Management: Experienced project, program, and change managers are crucial to overall success. They need to help drive business ownership of change – this is NOT an IT project it’s a business transformation project.

Flexibility: Be ready to pivot and realign as business evolves. M&A activity is important to a growing cold chain business, but it can have in flight project impacts. This in turn means iterative forward planning and architecture tweaking where needed.  Your core should however scale easily to accommodate change.

Business Operations: In lean logistics operations like cold chain businesses, early planning and external resource augmentation are necessary in an ongoing basis. The business still needs to operate while it’s being changed from within.

Currently CCH remains on track to achieve both economies of scale from the platform and overall operational cost savings.