Alacer Gold turns ERP refit project to Australia

If it hurts, it works

(Photo courtesy: Alacer Gold)

Although Alacer ignored some of ERP's common truisms, others emerged for the company following the first phase of the SAP implementation.

"Every time you do a project like this you say, 'We have to have the best resources', and operations might give you someone really good and they might not," Tilly said.

"When I went out to Turkey prior to the go-live and talked to the plant manager, and he was really upset with me because the person that we had taken had really hurt his operations being on our project, then I knew we had the right guy.

"It's one of the things we really stressed with our operations was that if you don't feel it, you didn't give us the right person.

"That is one of the things we all know, but that was absolutely a truism for us."

With the benefit of hindsight, Tilly said she would deploy corporate resources out to the mine sites faster.

"We put North American Alacer resources onsite in Turkey. We were trying to do it remotely for a long time and I wish we would have moved them out there sooner to be with the folks," she said.

"I was onsite [in Turkey] for the last 28 days of the project. I stayed at the mine site and worked with the folks there, we put up a war room and ... just through sheer willpower got [the system] in on April 1st and we went live successfully."