Transitioning core systems
Supporting the transition of a large scale ERP migration for Australia’s largest provider of industrial and safety supplies
CLIENT: Blackwoods
A subsidiary of the Wesfarmers Group, Blackwoods is Australia’s largest provider of industrial and safety supplies. Having grown from being a small marine supply business on the banks of Sydney Harbour, today it supports businesses, big and small, with a range of over 200,000 products from the world’s best brands.
Blackwoods has recognised the need to migrate to a modern ERP solution to continue building on customer improvements representing a large scale change and opportunity for digital transformation of the organisation. This is a multi-year migration that effects the core of the Blackwoods business with a complex service transition broken down by functionality and geography.
Supporting a complex IT service
management transition
Joining the project over a year into the migration, STCK is supporting Blackwoods to facilitate the technical service transition in manner that Blackwoods IT can receive today and continue to maintain, enabling the Blackwoods community beyond this migration programme.
This work has focused on three key areas:
Manage and deliver transition activities as part of Blackwoods team to provide velocity against existing programme timeline
Develop IT service management processes and practices to support ongoing effective management of Blackwoods ERP system
Uplift Blackwoods service management capability
What we did that is relevant here
STCK worked with Blackwoods to support and deliver transition on an ongoing basis.
Delivered transition activities for Minimum Viable Service (MVP)
In light of shifting programme delivery timelines, an MVP approach was adopted focusing on core service management needs only. This approach supported existing hard deadlines set by the programme and allowed IT to focus efforts on service support readiness and usability testing, while reducing risk in the broader deployment by completing light-touch human-centred discovery. Delivering in this way gave the team and the client confidence that a solid foundation for the broader change was in place from a service management perspective.
Developed Blackwoods IT Service (BITS) Standard
Working with the Blackwoods team on the ERP migration, it was recognised the ability to support a smooth transition and solid operation of new services was being constrained by a lack of clarity in what is required to make this happen.
The Blackwoods IT Service (BITS) Standard was created as a working prototype in line with the TBW programme to address this, highlighting the expected service capability (service management activities able to be performed) and deliverables required to support this capability. We call this framework a ‘Standard’ due to its envisaged use to determine if a programme/project is fit to be allowed through to the live Blackwoods technology estate.