Since 1994, the leaders of the company had a clear visionary business strategy to increase the overall business performance and process efficiency; starting from business budget, forecast, resource planning, logistics and procurement until the sales and dispatch; all of this to be controlled through financial and controlling precise tools and methods. 

This vision was translated into a clear project mission to adopt and implement an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) package that is capable to provide all the above through a stable network system. Although this decision follows and supports the development and improvement of business plans set by management, risk accompanied this decision of implementing a multi-million-project in the middle of hard financial and economical status the world is undergoing recently.

there were few factors to ensure the success of this investment in the most important business project the group ever considered:

1. ERP implementation is a Business Project.
2. Ownership of the Project.
3. Appropriate Project Organization.
4. Implementation of a Standard SAP Methodology.
5. Core Processes in Phase I as a Target.
6. End User Acceptance Strategy.
7. Full Project Documentation.
8. Legacy Systems.

The above factors were the core of the project success along with the appropriate project preparation carried out in the beginning of the project implementation.

The project preparation was well studied and well carried out by setting up the appropriate project organization starting with choosing knowledgeable team of Business Owners (of the targeted business areas: Production Planning, Sales and Distribution, Procurement, Warehouse, Human Resources, Finance and Control) and the highly active and effective Business Key Users in those areas; all of those cooperating with a highly skilled management team that is characterized by fresh success- eager minds, striving knowledge seekers and determined risk taking sponsor.

The next step was to renew and build the infrastructure needed to start the project ensuring the use of appropriate and up-to-date technological hardware and software tools through a highly skilled IT technical team. Having the strong basis to start the project, the next step was to determine and set the scope of project for the first phase of implementation to target and control 80% of the business processes. Later on, the project management team was not only to set the appropriate project plan but to firmly follow-up the assigned tasks by conducting periodic project team and steering committee meetings to ease the flow of the implementation and ensure meeting the tasks deadlines.

The project can be summarized by the few success figures below:

Now going live since December 28th, 2008, the business witnessed a big leap towards a better promising future. Through the successful monthly closing of January and February 2009, the Business Owners along with the Top Management unanimously agreed that the business is witnessing an overall improvement in many targeted areas.