Turn on a TV in Belgium and you’ll be quick to spot a yellow smiley square. It’s the logo for Telenet, one of the largest providers of cable broadband services in Belgium, specialising in the supply of internet and phone services and cable television.
Telenet has been providing Belgian families with their favourite TV shows for years. But things aren’t always easy behind the scenes. So when a Finance and Supply Chain transformation programme was starting to run behind schedule, our cross-border team stepped in to help.
“It was a very difficult job to put a project that was not running well back on the rails. You should be very proud of this achievement.”
Keeping to the schedule
As Telenet expanded over the years, it outgrew its previous Oracle resourcing platform (this looked after everything HR, Finance and Supply Chain, through to time sheets, expenses claims, from purchase orders and management reporting). So, in 2016, Telenet pulled together a skilled team of over 100 people to design and implement a brand new enterprise resource planning system, called Fusion.
Fusion would support Telenet across its entire Finance, HR, Project Management and Procurement functions – its largest business and IT transformation in 15 years. A year into its development, we got the call to come in and support the team.
Back to the future
To help keep the project on track, we drew on our Oracle expertise across the UK and Netherlands, and our management reporting team in the Netherlands and Italy to support our business change experts from Belgium. First task: plan it. Alongside Telenet’s team we reviewed and re-planned Fusion’s implementation, and put in place better governance and stakeholder management arrangements.
Next up: test it. We worked with Telenet IT to deliver over 100 business process designs, and tested them through more than 7,000 different scenarios to make sure they’d work end to end.
With a major transformation such as this, nothing can be left to chance. Next task: trial it. We ran two mock trial runs for the move from the old system to the new one, which helped to make sure all business, data and technical activities in the final cut-over took place on time.
Just ask Fred
With such a big campaign, not getting stuck in project management and remembering the people is key. We helped look after communications informing Telenet staff and customers about the changes and the benefits they’d see. We also created self-study materials and classroom-style training for 150+ core users of the system.
And because change equals questions, the 30+ trained floor-walkers helping Telenet staff with questions were ably assisted by Fred, a 24/7 online chatbot who had all the answers on basic navigation and ways of working with Fusion. Fred was popular - he answered 1,500 questions in the first week alone.
The end result? Telenet has a new solution ready to support Belgian TV (not to mention broadband and mobile) for years to come.
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