Entries by Lee Stout

Field Notes: The 24-Hour Delay That Ended a Cost Variance Problem for Good

As ERP Architect, I stepped into an on-premise Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud (Fusion) migration at a decades-old manufacturer. Before the migration work could really start, I found a live operational problem underneath it. The company builds to customer-specific configuration only. Every sales order generates a unique part number, built manually off a spreadsheet. The […]

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Field notes: replacing a 77,000-cell spreadsheet with two BOMs

I stepped into a Master Scheduling function for a manufacturer of highly configurable portable spas — 25 products across multiple brands, each with up to 5 outer shells, 7 seating and jet configurations, 10 seat color patterns, and a menu of jet packages, lighting, and audio options on top.   All of that lived in […]

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The Real Go-Live of ERP Happens About Three Months In. | Published in Supply Chain Brain

Three months after go-live, the spreadsheets come back. Inventory stops matching the system. Planners start padding buffers because nobody trusts the numbers. Expediting becomes the default — and leadership starts wondering whether the whole implementation failed. I’ve watched this pattern repeat in plants from $50 million to multi-billion in revenue — different ERP platforms, different […]

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The ERP Decision That Almost Made Me Walk Away | Published in Manufacturing Tomorrow

Selecting software should be the last decision in an ERP project, not the first. That runs contrary to how most manufacturers approach it — and it’s the mistake that quietly sinks implementations before they ever go live. I wrote about a project I nearly walked away from, and what changed my mind, for Manufacturing Tomorrow. […]

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