Our quarters go August to October, November to January, February to April, and May to
July.9 So right here on May 1, beginning of the fourth quarter, we are asking “how long should
it take to do a project to replace all of our core systems?” This is truly how it went. We said
“you know we can't implement in the fourth quarter. The auditors will have a complete cow.”
If it takes a year we will be implementing fourth quarter, and that won't work. We thought it
really should take 15 months, July or August a year later. Tom Herbert, the program manager,
said there's no way we are going to take 15 months to get this done. That's ridiculous. So we
started going in the opposite direction and said well can we do it in five months? That just
didn't seem right. Understand we did not have a scope yet. In the end we basically settled
that we wanted to go live at the beginning of Q3, so we would be completely stable for Q4.
(See Exhibit 2 for a summary of milestone ERP implementation dates.)