We said that we had this big outage in January. That we were the biggest customer of our current software vendor and that the vendor was being bought by another company. It was unclear who was going to support our existing systems and we needed to do something. The reliability, the scalability, and the modifiability of our current applications would not support our anticipated future growth. We needed either upgrades to the new version of the current application or we needed to replace it. If we replaced it, we could either do it in parts or do it as a whole. We evaluated those three alternatives, talked about the pros and cons of each alternative, and recommended that we replace our systems, big-bang, with one ERP solution. We committed to do it in nine months for $15 million for the whole thing. (See Exhibit 3 for a
breakdown of project costs.)