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O’KIRWAN: Even with modern technology it would have been difficult to implement this kind of systems remotely from New York.

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O’KIRWAN: If we chose a very complicated system then we would have to hire more people to bring that in and that wasn’t ideal.

While eSolutions may have secured the contract, it was not from being the only contender as the company went up against some tough opposition.

"In terms of choosing platforms, we had one partner from Oracle present a solution. We had a New York-based company that currently does billing for New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) present their platform and we had eSolutions. Those were the three that we shortlisted," he recalls.

That may not seem like a large number when one thinks of all the ERP vendors in the market that have solutions for both SMBs and enterprises - and O'Kirwan agrees: "There were quite a lot of vendors in this space. We issued an initial RFI and we were very clear in terms of the deadline in which they had to submit their response and the deadline for us completing the project."

"In terms of choosing a solution provider, they had two key things that we were looking at. One was that they could actually respond to the RFI in time - and some of them didn't, so they were eliminated at that point. Others came back with such a long timeline for implementation that we were able to eliminate those as well. That's really where we came down to three, where we were looking at three different technologies. We made it primarily on delivery time, availability of local skills and the price," he says.

It is always difficult to nail down the criteria enterprises use when making a final decision on selection, but for O'Kirwan, experience in delivering in these types of projects on time was king: "In terms of a selection matrix, we obviously had a cost function, and we needed to stay within the period. Clearly, the New York-based vendor had an advantage having done billing for NYMEX but then it was on a different scale and a much larger project. It was also a multi-year project for them."

"One of our key things was to also choose a solution provider and partner that were physically based in Dubai, somebody we could call up and have meetings with. Even with modern technology, we felt that it would be difficult to implement this remotely from New York," he adds.

One of the most oft-quoted (and disputed) unofficial statistics about large-scale ERP projects is that over 80% of them fail at some point. It's very interesting to note then, the size of the team that O'Kirwan allocated to the implementation - namely, himself and one other.

"We had myself doing project management and the only other resource we deployed was one of the young graduates from the Higher Colleges of Technology. She's only just completed her degree, so very new in terms of IT experience and stuff like that. That was also another factor - when I brought in ERP, I needed to look at the skills within the team. If we chose a very complicated system, then we would have to hire more people to bring that in and that wasn't an option for us," he says.

Apart from deploying Great Plains ERP, eSolutions also had the task of building a billing module for DME to replace their earlier system of doing financials via Excel spreadsheets which was used mainly during the early start-up phase. The billing system was crucial towards the operation of the exchange and was prioritised ahead of modules like HR, which went live later in the year.

Trading began on June 1 2007 and billing went live on June 15. Support is presently handled by eSolutions via a platinum support agreement with a number of incidents allowed per year. O'Kirwan describes the level of support as ‘responsive' - issues have been resolved either over the phone or via a representative dispatched the next business day, which is a major plus for the business.

Issues during the implementation were few and far between, mainly, as O'Kirwan recalls, due to the fact that the finance team were very clear in defining their needs, allowing him and his team to proceed very quickly.

There was one issue, but he describes it as relatively minor: "The way we receive data from the billing engines is that we get an XML file nightly which contains the trade data - we then need to process that through billing and put it into finance. There were some changes in the way that the file was structured and in the way it was sent from New York. What was contained in that file was basically subject for discussion on a few occasions, but it was not a major issue and was resolved in conjunction with eSolutions, ourselves and NYMEX New York. We had lots of late night conference calls doing that."

O'Kirwan says that the project has more than delivered on the initial objectives he set out and is looking ahead to future improvements to functionality: "We've now closed two financial years on the system. What we're now looking at in this calendar year is extending what we do with that platform. We're adding a fixed assets module to do all of our asset inventory, purchasing and requisitioning modules and we're going to be adding a business portal.

"These are all components that are in Great Plains anyway. All we're doing is basically turning on modules when we have the resources to manage and support it. We didn't want to deploy a full big-bang, every-single-thing, because first, we don't have the team to support it and second, it would have taken us too long. We would have defocused from the core components we needed to deploy," he concludes.

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