Open communication to all stakeholders is key, outgoing CFO: Southern Africa for Godrej Consumer Products Emmah Makomva believes. It is key to everything she does, including the success of the company’s recent ERP changeover.
A BCom Rhodes University graduate and with a masters from UCT Business School. Emmah started off at Procter & Gamble, where she spent 16 years. She was part of the leadership team that introduced Always feminine pads manufacturing for the very first time at the Johannesburg manufacturing site that had always historically produced Pampers nappies.
From P&G, she moved to Kelloggs. “Balancing the finances of Corn and Bran flakes vs Coco Pops/Rice Krispies was very exciting. Noodles was a totally different food segment to cereals and became even more important during Covid,” she recalls.
She joined Godrej Consumer Products as CFO for Southern Africa in May 2022. Godrej Consumer Products manufactures and sells Darling braids and crochets, Inecto and Renew haircolour. It is the recent change of the ERP system, from MS Dynamics to SAP that is a standout for her at Godrej Consumer products.
“This was a very big project for us and was to be rolled out throughout the region. Our cluster being the largest, representing Southern Africa was to be the first one to transition. This was to determine the regional roll-out and therefore it was critical that we got it right,” she explains.
Emmah shares several points that stand out for her which resulted in this project being a phenomenal success.
Key stakeholders
“The sponsors of the project and the leadership management team were two critical stakeholders, important because we were not going to have a separate project management team to focus on the project alone. The sponsors were the head office (HO) leadership, and the management team included the business head, HR head, IT (from HO and local cluster) and me as CFO. The involvement of the sponsors and inclusion of local and head office leadership proved imperative, because the local team focused on the business fundamentals and risks, actions and concerns, while the HO established core project deliverables and highlighted potential issues including risk mitigation plans,” she explains.
“The second aspect to mention was the project team which was the SAP consulting team was made up of SAP experts – an external SAP consulting team and our business SAP/IT team from HO. This resulted in a right balance of the external expertise and the business expertise/knowledge. The decision was that all teams would be on-site across the countries with the main team located in SA. This allowed training and transition to be done through hands-on experience with expert guidance,” she adds.
How the communication regarding all the project details was relayed cannot be under-valued. Emmah adds that open communication was key. “How are we going to train and who was going to be trained? What did user acceptance testing (UAT) mean? How were we planning to address the issues others faced in such significant transitions? It was clear to us that if we avoided the complexity and potential issues and we didn’t highlight, then people wouldn't be comfortable to open up and say look, we could have a problem here,” she says.
The first meeting included all the project plan information. What stands out was the discussion on the complexities and issues that may arise, and what the risk mitigation plan would be.
“I think that kicked the project off in the right direction in terms of open communication. It allowed the sponsors to tell us ‘Ok, guys, expect this could potentially go wrong, tell us exactly how you are going to handle it and what support would you need’? And we were also very open to convey this to our internal stakeholders, stating ‘it’s going to be tough, it’s not going to be easy’,” she notes.
Utilising resources
“Secondly, we ensured we had the buy-in of all those internal stakeholders – the functional leaders and their teams – by including them on the objectives, detailed timelines and expectations. The last note on communication, was an effective but indirect communication/dashboard tool that requested an update on users’ comfort and confidence with the training, testing and using the new system. It requested every user to state, are you in the red, are you in the orange, are you in the green. Using the report results allowed us to address problems with understanding/confidence or areas that required business to review,” she adds.
The utilisation of resources also became crucial to the overall process.
“A critical point of note for our business, as mentioned earlier is that we did not have an internal project team, the end users who were doing their normal daily jobs, were the same users for the SAP transition that would cover a three to four-month period excluding the stabilisation period afterwards. This seemed impossible.”
“We were very open with the business team to say we are not hiring a different project team. I emphasise this point, because as much as people knew they were going to work hard, we required that they understood this. It was good we did this as the users bought into the fact that we highlighted this point and properly addressed it. We didn’t try and pretend that you are going to have extra time, you’re going to have extra hands. The training and testing were tough on the teams,” she recalls.
How the company handled this was through a three-pronged approach, viz. a detailed daily training plan that accommodated business daily activities at beginning and end of day; business goals and targets for the project timelines were reviewed to accommodate the change in working hours; and incentives for additional working hours. The project quality was therefore not compromised.
Clear timelines
Emmah also highlights that project scope and deliverables were clear, but adds that the timing of the changeover was intentionally selected. “We decided to change over at the beginning of the fiscal year so that only the new system would be used for the new year, and we would not need parallel systems. We therefore addressed business targets at end of the year and beginning of the new year,” she explains.
“We ensured finance led the transactional part of the project as the function that is central to the total business. We completed detailed timelines for the different activity chains for the prior and new year. This included what was termed a ‘blackout period’ when they would be no business transactions to allow all the transitional work on systems and information to be completed.”
“The last thing I would highlight is that the key stakeholders, from leadership down to the key users on the ground, worked well together. The business head and HR provided their full support. The HO IT head and project teams were on site right throughout the project.”
“We cannot conclude without special emphasis to the finance team, integral to all the transactional work together with the other business users who went the extra mile to transition whilst doing their normal work as well, I think without this type of exceptional commitment, we may not have been successful.”
