Beth Hughes, AAFA

Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to welcome you today's webinar, Renfro Brands Digital Transformation, sponsored by Sunrise Technologies. My name is Beth Hughes, Vice President of Trade and Customs Policy from the American Apparel and Footwear Association, and I will serve as your moderator today. First, a quick overview of AAFA. We are the National Trade Association representing apparel, footwear, and other products companies and their suppliers, which compete in the global market. Representing more than 1,000 world famous name brands, AAFA is the trusted public policy and political voice of the apparel and footwear industry. AAFA drives progress on three key priorities: brand protection, supply chain and sourcing, trade, logistics, and manufacturing. AAAFA approaches its work through the lens of purpose-driven leadership that supports each member's ability to build and sustain inclusive and diverse cultures, meet and advance ESG goals, and draw upon the latest technology. If you experience any technical difficulties throughout, please contact GoToWebinar support at 1-800-263 6317. Today's webinar is being recorded and it will be available for download on AAFA's Learning Center, along with a presentation deck within 48 hours. We encourage everyone to participate and ask questions throughout the webinar.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Please type them into the question box in your GoToWebinar control panel. All questions will be answered during the Q&A segment at the end of the presentation. So let's get started. I'm pleased to introduce our speakers today. Joining us from Sunrise Technologies, we have Alex Hunt, who is the Director of Consulting. Alex has extensive Dynamics 365 product and implementation experience and has served as a project manager for Renfro Brands' Dynamics 365 implementation Sunrise. Also joining us is Mike Everly, CIO of Renfro Brands. As part of the executive leadership team, Mike is responsible for the technology, cybersecurity, and business integration for the leading designer, manufacturer, and marketer of quality stocks and legwork products. During today's webinar, you will learn why Renfro Brands decided to embark on a digital transformation project, how the implementation changed the company's operations, and tips and insights when selecting a trusted service partner. With that, Alex and Mike, I'll hand it over to you to begin.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Thank you, Beth.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Thanks, Beth. Very happy to talk with everyone. Before we dive into questions, I just wanted to give everybody a little bit of context of how Mike and I have worked together through the phases of implementation. Renfro has worked with Sunrise to strategically plan out phased go-lives. I've known Mike for a number of years now and the go-live that we want to talk about most is our order-to-cash go-live with Renfro. At this point in the project, we'd already gone live with financials, we'd gone live with procurement and production at two manufacturing facilities. At this point in the project, we are planning on going live with order-to-cash, including EDI. Since then, we're still working together. We're working on going live with Japan and other areas of the business as well. But where Mike and I worked most closely together was on order-to-cash phase. That's what we wanted to spend some time talking about with you today and provide some feedback based on that experience.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Very good. Thanks, Alex. My name is Mike Everly. Like Alex was saying, we know each other for a couple of years. I've been at Renfro for three years as CIO. Prior to me coming there, Sunrise was the the implementer and provider for Dynamics. So I really jumped in right in the middle of the project. But as we're going to talk about today, it was very smooth, and I think we're going to have a lot of information and good information to talk to you about today.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Great. So let's Let's jump into this. Let's first start, I think, for the folks on the webinar today. Talk a little bit more about scope and solution. Why did Renfro start this journey? Why did you go with D365? And why Sunrise?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Yeah, and I could start. So again, like I was saying, Renfro started this journey prior to me coming here, but But we're a 100-year-old company. We're a manufacturer. We're based in North Carolina, and we had a lot of legacy applications and legacy processes. We were on an IBM mainframe custom for all of our ERP and our warehouse system. As the world was changing, and this is pre-COVID, as the world was changing and we were becoming more of an omnichannel company and selling our socks, our legacy systems just didn't really meet the need that we had on this changing environment. We looked at a lot of potential applications, and we chose Microsoft Dynamics because of its adaptability, its familiarity, or the familiarity with the Microsoft product. It integrated well with our other systems. We're a Microsoft shop. And so there was a lot of benefits from a technology perspective, but also there was a lot of benefits from a functional perspective that the users are used to the interface, and it's a great solution for a company such as ours.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Great. What were the most important components of the project scope and any pain points prior to implementation?

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

As far as the scope in this particular phase of the project for order-to-cash, including an EDI integration, the most challenging part was making sure we could get the level of comfort with the transactional volume, with 5,000 to 10,000 orders a day. We knew from diagnostics and scoping that the software could handle that it's handled at many places all over the world before, but making sure that we can get our data and processes piloted in a way where we all had the comfort that it would satisfy the business requirements as it did. Any part of a project phase that is customer-facing, like order-to-cash with invoicing and all of those sorts of things, there's always an additional level of due diligence that you to go through when piloting those activities. We were successful working together. I think one of the things that was a temptation for the core team early on was trying to drive an ERP implementation and it being more steered by an IT group. We worked together to transition that ownership to more of the business. They felt like they were being brought along and had leadership voices. Over the course of working with Mike, we kind of successfully transitioned the mindset from an IT-led project to a business-led project to satisfy what was really going to be in the best interest of their priorities from a leadership group.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

And I will say from an end user culture was probably, and from my perspective anyway, one of the biggest challenges for this. As I said, we were on a legacy mainframe application, and the users at Renfro, just like Alex was saying, relied on IT to do a lot of work. We're the ones that created all the reports. If there was any issue, it was IT, let's try to fix this? It was a shift in how the company viewed the project. Like you said, it went from an IT project to more of a business project. And now, from an accountability perspective, it went to users who are going to use the application. Alex and Sunrise, together, we really helped drive that. And really the culture is still changing here. But as we discuss a little more, the users are more involved and they want to be involved now, which is really a positive thing.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

That's great. I was going to ask how long it took to change people's minds and get them on board, but it sounds like maybe still doing a little bit of that.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

We're still there. I mean, honestly, we've had...there's people in this organization...we're a 100-year-old company. When I first started, we were celebrating people's 50th year working here. Fifty years. That's crazy if you think about it. But we're doing a great job moving forward.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

That's good. That's good to hear. All right, so can we just move a little bit and talk about the implementation itself and how that process changed Renfro as an organization. What aspect of the project most excited you? And then tell us a little bit about what aspect most worried you.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I'll go back and I'll start with the most worry, and culture and people adapting to the new system. There was definitely concern. When I first started in September of '19, that was about five months before the pandemic. So historically, we all, Renfro and many companies, went into the office and that's where you worked. And so the pandemic hit, and we're starting a large portion of an ERP project, and now all of a sudden, everybody has to go home and work remotely. That was a huge challenge for us. Looking back, and Alex and I have we talked about this, looking back, it was probably almost a good thing that that happened because we had to become more efficient in what we did, the meetings that were more focused. We did a great job adapting to working at home. We implemented this remotely, which I find is amazing. If you would have told me that when I first started, I would have said it could never happen. The positive, one of the things that I love about Dynamics is where users have their ability to look at data and make decisions without waiting for IT to create a static report or without.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

It's one of those, you talk about teaching people to fish, and Dynamics allows us to do that now. Our users, many of them, are more productive because of the tools that they have and overcoming that fear. But now they're using tools that a couple of years ago on the mainframe didn't exist. That to me is a huge benefit. The integrations with a lot of applications. I can go on and on, but there's a lot of benefits to it.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Yeah. And speaking from my perspective, from the functionality side, having the visibility into inventory and planning and some of the work we did to track on the water inventory coming from overseas, planning in a way that we could also go live with something where the users could take more and more advantage of it even after go live. For example, we've got some intellectual property that Renfro took good advantage of for soft allocation. It's a different way of thinking about planning and having reports being proactive about how your supply and demand is matching over time. Mike's alluded to already multiple times, it's about change management, mindset shifts, going from having a lot of Excel-based reports for planning and doing it in a way where we can go live in phases, bring people along with us so they feel like they're empowered to make decisions and take advantage of the new tools. Then even after go live, there's many projects going on within Renfro where they're taking more product lines through the soft allocation process and looking for opportunities to do some more automated release to the warehouse. There's, of course, you're turning on a lot of great functionality at go-live, but then you also have opportunities where Microsoft is releasing new feature updates throughout the year.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

They might take advantage of new functionality like with lease management. There's There's aspects of it that's always a growing living thing that we work together in a partnership to try to highlight what new opportunities might be available that Renfro could take advantage of.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

That's great. You mentioned change management on it. Can you go into a little detail about how that was handled?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Yeah, I could talk about that. One of the things that as we transition, and I tell people in some ways we are 100 a year-old startup. I'm going to say culture again, but there's a certain way that people have done things. Like Alex alluded to, we had a lot of Excel spreadsheets. I tell people we are probably one of the best users of Excel in the world. We use it all over the place. The goal is to try to have more automation and be able to  become more self-sufficient. The transition to Dynamics has allowed us to be more self-sufficient and actually bring up changes. People now have ideas that they didn't have before because we always did it this way. Now, all of a sudden, people have ideas of, "We can do things better," and they're coming up with ideas. It's very positive.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

From the implementation side on how we work together, it goes without saying any ERP implementation, change management is the number one challenge, no matter what product you're implementing. One of the things that was helpful for our core team working together is there's aspects of the methodology we use at Sunrise, where we use basically an iterative approach to show functions in the software every five weeks. We have basically a sprint plan to help get design complete where we bring the users along with us to where they're not expected to just read through Word documents about outline and design over the course of months and then sign off on it and then hope that it all works when you get to CRP. Of course, there's better ways that we've all learned over the many years of doing implementations is that people can better understand things and understand what they're changing into when they see their own data in the test environment and they see the software actually work. Instead of, like I said, the older way of doing that was a consultant sitting in a room with an end user, listening to them, writing down their feedback, and then writing a Word document how that's going to work in the software, the user signs off on that, but it's always a limited view when you do it that way.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

That's why it's an important guiding principle we have on all of our projects is to model it and demo it again and again. It's also not reasonable for an end user who's been doing something for 10 years in a certain way they're very comfortable with to see it one time in a software and sign off and understand that either. For that reason, we take an approach where we work with them and make sure that they understand how we're implementing best practices, how we're going to model it with standard functionality, and then listen to them if there's a gap and work together on it, on filling that gap together if we need to do some custom coding. But in any sense, we want to show it to them multiple times over the course of the design period, well before we even get into a conference room pilot. Then, of course, once we get into the conference room pilot, we want that user to drive through the process to reinforce all of those processes will work for them.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I will add, and I almost forgot to say this, we're going to the cloud, right? This is the cloud. Change management when you're running an application in the cloud is Microsoft requires us to do three upgrades per year, which if you're used to having an on-premise system, you don't have to upgrade because you're in control. One of the challenges that we have, and we've really gotten to a rhythm within the organization, is regression testing. Because we have to upgrade three times a year, there's a lot of benefits to that. We get a lot of new functionality. But what that also means is people's screens are changing. Three times a year, if I'm working in accounts receivable, this is what my screen looks like. But three times a year, that screen may change. That was a challenge initially, but people now understand that we're getting new functionality, and with that comes testing and upgrades. We're in a rhythm, and I couldn't be happier as the CIO.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Before you get to your next question, Mike and I have also worked with Microsoft products for a number of years prior to our time at Renfro, too. We're also very aware that the previous way of handling a software implementation was you go through this process. It's very intensive. It's very disruptive. There's risk that you have to mitigate along the way. Then once you're live, prior to being in the cloud, time would pass, you'd have to do another upgrade that's almost like a full other project. I'm referring to even back in Dynamics AX 2009 to Dynamics AX 2012, there was an aspect of those upgraded projects that you would need a full project team to help facilitate. The idea behind how Microsoft has evolved the product and gone into the cloud, and what's beneficial about having these three updates throughout the year and doing some regression testing is that it avoids having to do that full project upgrade like you would have had to do in the past and getting people back on site, back together and going from the '09 product to the 2012 product. Ideally, Renfro and other customers around the world on Dynamics can take advantage of that, too.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

That the software is getting more functionality, it's growing over time, it's evolving, and it's doing it in a way that doesn't necessitate another full-scale implementation with a full consulting team. It's really intended to help the company itself, like Renfro, to manage it in more of a self-sustaining way, too, with good partners around the world, too. But that's been one of the things that's been a benefit just in my career, too, seeing how going from 4.0 to '09 to 2012 to these things and making it to where it makes it a lot better in the long term.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Well, I think you enjoy this, Mike, but I wanted to ask, how did you enjoy this Sunrise methodology? It sounds like it went well, but...

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I will say this. I've been doing IT for a long time. I've been through multiple ERP implementations with multiple products, SAP, and I've worked with multiple integrators or system, like folks like Sunrise. They asked me to be a reference for them. I will tell you, I'm very transparent, and I turned down... with Sunrise, though, honestly, I've never experienced a better methodology, a better structure. These projects are very difficult. Most fail, and I've been through a couple that we've spent a year or two, and all of a sudden we didn't go live. I will say that Sunrise methodology, their dashboards, their ability to know where they are at any given time of the project I'm amazed in some ways. Even as an IT guy, it's done this for a long time. It's not easy to do that. Especially when Alex was our project manager, he kept us on track. I knew where we were. When we were behind, they told us we were behind. I honestly, I wholeheartedly support how Sunrise operates a project. I love it. As a CIO, because in the end, the business is looking at me as the owner of this project, right?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

It's hard for me to go back, and I'm not going to blame someone else. I'm responsible, I'm accountable. To have a good partner is, you have to have that or you're not going to be successful.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Right, definitely. What processes change the most for an implementation?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Well, I mean, just the way we do business. I mean, and that's a general statement, but there's a different thought process on how we do business. Again, we talked about culture, and I said we're still fighting some of that. We need to automate things. We're trying to make it more efficient. We're trying to... We had people that what they did every day was manage a spreadsheet. They copy and paste it into a spreadsheet. That's not making Renfro more productive. Our goal is to automate those things. There's the RPA tools, and there's different things that we're doing, some Microsoft products, some not Microsoft products that we're trying to automate. But in the end, we're more efficient, and we hear this all the time. We want to scale the business. Prior to doing this, we couldn't scale. Scaling is growing the business exponentially without exponentially adding people. We're able to do that, and we're at a point where as we become more efficient, we need to scale. That's what we want to do. We want to grow this business without adding a lot of people.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

It's also opportunistic that you could take the same person that was spending X amount of hours a day or a speak on a task that was very tedious. Now that same person can free up their time to speak, to think more strategically and think further out. They're not trying to plan something that's on a shorter time window. They can look further out and have the tools and the data that allows them to do that, too. That's been good working with the team on those types of things, too.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I will say when we talk about data, That is one thing that data is... We're a sock manufacturer, and besides socks, number two, the most important asset we have is our data. The ability to make decisions with that data, with the right data to make business decisions, the quicker we can make those better decisions, that's going to benefit Renfro. We are getting to a point where we're getting better with our data understanding and be able to have the executives make or anyone in the business truly make decisions on the data that we have quickly and not take a three-month project where IT is creating a report that we're going to get and it's going to be old data anyway.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

So did the scope of the project change in any significant way from maybe where you started to where you ended up?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Alex, I'll give that one to you.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

I think the biggest thing that we needed to make sure we could do and did do was to flush out with the business what key reports they were using out of Qlikview, QlikSense. We have a good structure of understanding of process flows and our data migrations. We have certainly areas where we want to take advantage of what standard dashboards there are in Dynamics by functional area. Then in addition to that, just to answer your question, it was really to make sure that the legacy reports that the key leaders needed to run the business, we could either answer for it in a new way, or we could provide the data in a way that helped Mike bring on a new team member who could handle the data warehouse. They're talking now about longer term objectives to get the data lake. But in general, we were just making sure that we could collect all of the feedback for all of their key reports. Then we ended I was adding some toward the end, but we did it in a way that was highlighted by end-to-end testing in the CRPs and making sure that at the end of the day, yes, the process was a pass, and yes, I had the information that I needed out of it for strategic thinking about it, too.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Great. All right. Well, let's get into the experience with Sunrise. We've touched on this throughout so far, but Mike, you touched on what it was like working with Alex, but what about the rest of the Sunrise team and the team that you work with now?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

So we had a team of about five from Sunrise through this implementation. And one of the things I could say about Sunrise, which differentiates themselves with some of the other partners that I've worked with, is they all truly have a vested interest in our success. Now, there are consultants and other companies which the goal, it's a business model. The longer they're there, they're getting revenue. In some ways, there's the incentive to create efficient processes and procedures and move on may not be there. I will tell you Sunrise does not have that thought process. Most people in our organization look at the Sunrise team as part of Renfro. They are consultants, but they all have our best interest in mind. In my three years here working with all of the team members, I've always had that feeling that they're trying to do the most efficient thing for us and really to make us successful and then for them to move on to another client. That's not always the in case. But I will tell you, the experience, they definitely have the right people for the right technical areas, functional areas. I've never had a problem with them.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

I appreciate what you're saying that, Mike. We've gone live as an organization about 500 times now, collectively over the many, many years. People, as in every company, is the number one thing, the number one thing that's important. It's a challenging process to go through these things, but it's also very rewarding. You get rich relationships going through this together. Even from a selfish standpoint, as for growing our business, it's a lot easier for us to get new customers by keeping our existing ones very happy. There's things that I could tell you how we do things or things like that, but it's so much more meaningful coming from someone like Mike who's got so much other experience and has worked with SAP and has worked with other partners. Keeping companies like Renfro successful and empowering them is really what gets us out of bed in the morning. Then maintain those relationships is only going to help us in the end anyway because we'll get new opportunities from our customers who've enjoyed the experience with us.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I can say not every scenario was rosy. There are times when I'd ask, Why did you do this? Or why did we do that? I will tell you, they take accountability. I'm not here to say everything Sunrise did is perfect because it wasn't. But when we worked as a team and partnership and when they not one time have ever said... That didn't take accountability. To me, that means a lot from an individual, and it's even more amazing as an organization that does that.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Thanks, Mike.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Yeah, definitely. That's great to hear. That was my next question. Any feedback for Sunrise. Is there anything else, Mike, that you want to share? Any room for improvement, maybe?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

There's always a room for improvement. Again, I take accountability. There are times that there are things that we did wrong, or we designed it wrong. The thing about it is it was a joint effort between us and Sunrise and the business. There's nothing perfect, but you move on, you admit that, Okay, we did this wrong, and try to understand why we made the wrong decision, and then move on. I enjoy working with them. Again, I like Sunrise.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Thanks, Mike. Yeah, I mean, all of the feedback in general, we don't wait till the end of the project to get feedback either. It's supposed to be this continual conversation about how we can help each other and support each other. Mike alluded to some of the tools we have from project management and the KPIs that we share. They're the exact same KPIs that Mike sees that the Sunrise executives see on their phones every morning, too. The intention is to be very transparent with where the project stands, just like we've got some of the intellectual property within the software that Renfro took advantage of. We've got intellectual property around our project management tool that's custom to our methodology and supports it. It's a very important part of what we do is making those metrics very transparent and being able to have it done the same way across all of our projects that are going on within the company so that we have some apples to apples comparisons about how things might have fallen behind in a different flow somewhere else and how they caught up and what are the warning signs early to try to surface these things to where the leadership team has time to react and isn't surprised because the challenges are inevitable.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

We'll have areas that, based on experience, we can highlight very early. We want to do an exhaustive diagnostics process to highlight those. But as things pop up, it's just as important that they get highlighted immediately, too. It's helpful to work with Mike on that on a very constant back and forth on where we're at.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Great. Thank you, guys. So we're going to open up now to the audience and get their questions. As a reminder, folks, please be sure to type your questions into the question box in your control panel. We will address as many questions as possible call, and the speakers will be able to respond via email to any unanswered questions after the webinar. So one that we have here is what type of timeline was charted out for the project?

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

For the particular phase that we did together, we ended up kicking off in March 2019. We went live in September 2020. We were on site about every other week up until March of 2020 during the COVID lockdown. I won't speak for you, Mike, but at the time, we wanted to react in a flexible way. We collectively decided not to pause the project. We worked together on how to map out our plan to transition to fully remote work. One of the things that happens is we were fortunate that the technology, like Microsoft Teams, was at a spot where we could do this. We could do it effectively, we could share screens effectively, and we could maintain meeting cadence and work together in that way. We did end up spending some time strategizing around how to be successful with that as everybody around the world was figuring out that way to work at the same time. Then one of the things I remember distinctly was we ran CRP fully remote. If you were to ask me five years before or whatever, Would you recommend us doing a conference room pilot remotely? I'd say, No, of course not. I've never done that before.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

I think there's value in being in the room together. But when you're faced with a challenge in the core team and you got a tool to use, we figured out the most effective way to do it. I remember having a conversation with Mike afterwards. We were both like, wow, that really worked. We thought it was going to work. We planned it. You never know until you do it. We did it. We actually found some wins where it was easier for people to float around different meeting rooms that they would have been physically separated from had we been on site anyway. That had an impact to some of the timeline, but it was done in a way where we wanted to be thoughtful about the challenges we were facing together and then coming up with the best way to address it as a group.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I think at the end of the... We end up delaying, I believe it was like a month or a month and a half. What we did is we brought the business units together and we had a green, yellow, red scorecard for each business unit that had something to do with this go live, and we talked through it. We had conversations and asked why we're doing this and through the business units, what are you going to do to get to that point where you're ready to go live? Again, it's communication and teamwork is really what gets you through these projects.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Yeah, you both brought up some good things. I'm going to ask a question that I have, actually. One for you, Alex. You mentioned having to do some of this remotely because of COVID. Have you guys changed any of your methodology to continue doing things like that because you just feel like it worked well, like you mentioned, maybe having people in virtual rooms together that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Right. Yeah, it's an excellent question. The core of the methodology, like what we care about and how we run meetings and how we shadow and present, those things didn't change. We speak with conviction whether we're remote or onsite, those things stay the same. There is still value going onsite. Mike and I were talking last night about we're working together in Japan. We've got consultant in Japan in a different phase of the project right now, and there's value in them being on site, but they're not on site every week. We're picking our spots. I think that whenever we make a decision together to go on site, we want to do our show and tell demos on site. We still do recommend that we do conference room pilots on site, but it is nice to have in your back pocket that you've got this flexibility in a proven process that can be successful remotely as well. We're finding from project to project, depending on the scope and the geographic locations, it just makes sense to be remote. Sometimes you're doing a conference pilot and you've got four distribution centers that are doing end-to-end testing. In the past, we'd send a consultant to four different parts of the country all at the same time.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Now, there's just more tools in our tool belt to help us work a little bit more streamlined remotely. To also answer your question, we're not necessarily doing full projects remotely, but we are being thoughtful about making sure that we can talk with the client from the project team about what do we think is going to work best and where do we want to pick those spots.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Yeah, it's great, the flexibility that we all have now. Then you mentioned this a little to Mike about the project. This question came from the audience was your project finished on time and on budget? You said you had a little delay, but can you expand on that a little bit?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Yeah, I will say for the most part, we were on budget. I don't know. It may sway it a little bit above just because of the addition. But for the most part, and it comes down to the communication and the recurring meetings or follow-ups that we have. It's an agile world. The project is an agile project. In the old days, you used to wait till the end and you did a test and decided that something you changed eight months ago doesn't work anymore. I think that keeps us on budget now, and it kept us on budget, and it kept us on the time frame because at any given point, and again, this goes back to the methodology, at any given point, we know where we're at in the project. We know when we're behind, and we know when we're ahead. If we're behind, we adjusted. Whatever that meant, we figured that out as a team and adjusted to try to get back into… We have a real-world example in this Japan project that we're working on, that we have some… This is Renfro Japan in Tokyo, and we have a partner, not Sunrise, that's working locally on the ground, but we also have Sunrise in the U.S. really driving the project.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

They were behind, and we have some folks from Renfro and some folks from Sunrise that have been there for the in the last two weeks, and we are back on track. It was going to be probably an extended two months to this project, and by sending folks over there for two weeks, we got back on track. You can't wait. You have to have constant communication, and you can drive projects and keep them on track.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Then one of the things about scope from my perspective is we want to be able to have frequent communication, like Mike was saying. Of course, we've got a statement of work that outlines our scope for the phase. We've got alignment there. But it's also done in a way where when Renfro's leadership team recognizes the opportunity, they had a leader come up with, if we could collaborate with our vendors in a better way and they could have visibility to our data: "Help me understand what capabilities do we have out of Dynamics that we didn't use to in our legacy system?" Then we talked about vendor collaboration. No, we didn't previously identify that in diagnostics because it wasn't a strategic objective at that time from the leadership's point of view. But as they discussed what they would like to have, we talked about, Yeah, let's bring that into scope. What are the pros and cons? What are the options? What's an estimate? Who do you need from our team to get design complete on that and test it? Then you come to a timeline of that, too. That might fit in the timeline of the existing scope as well, just if you've got a thoughtful way of doing it.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

In general, the scope needs to be defined, and then it needs to be evaluated to make sure that the leaders are getting what they want. If we recognize the opportunity together, we can add the scope together as well.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Great. Thanks. Another question here from the audience. This seems rather IT focused? Was there a business sponsor engaged to lead the CM efforts?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Yes. I obviously led it from the IT perspective. And prior, like Alex was talking about, prior phases, it was led by IT. This phase was actually led by the business. The appropriate business executives for that were in scope led it and their team. We have steering committees and we're driving to make sure that we're on the right track. Again, it's collaboration. But the business was a big part of this. Alex and I both said, that's how you're successful because the business is, they're the functional users. They're the ones that are going to be using this system. We may do something from an IT perspective that makes IT sense but doesn't make functional business sense. The goal is to allow the business to be successful and efficient.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Great. Another question here. Is it safe to assume Renfro implemented module by module or complete go live with all modules at once?

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

It was a phased approach, and not individual modules, but pieces of functionality. One of the things that we needed to do for Renfro was have a way to get off of a very heavily customized legacy system at IBM that was customized over multiple decades. Because of that process and talking through how to go about that, it did start in phases where we went live with financials only, with some integrations to legacy in other areas. Then we did manufacturing, and then we did order-to-cash. That plan gets right-sized by organization, by strategic goal. In many cases, you'll see opportunities for phase one and phase X. But for Renfro in particular, it made the most sense to do a multi-phased approach.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

And I will just say that we tried to minimize customizations. We do have customizations, and I think it's what differenti… The goal was to try to… The customizations were going to give us a competitive advantage. That's what we tried to say why we need to do a customization. I will say we have customizations, but there, I think it's an appropriate number.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Great. So when we were talking about implementation and how that changed Renfro as an organization, were there any major surprises along the way?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I wouldn't say there's surprises, like, oh, my goodness, surprises. I think there were positive surprises and there were negative surprises. The positive is there are people that are really grasping this new technology and a way of doing business. That's a good one. There are still, and I talk about culture, there are still folks that are, fighting is not the word, but are resistant to change. That's not just us, and that's not just this project. I think that's human nature in general. Part of what we're working on is just try to have everyone understand why we're doing things and not telling them this is what we're doing, but understanding why and how we are going to be...the goal is to do what's right for Renfro. When we do something, it means we're going to be more efficient and we could be more profitable. It's trying to do that to make people understand. I think people are understanding that this is a thing, that the world's changing, the economy is the way it is, and just the way we do business is changing. We're doing a lot more e-commerce now. Our business model is really different than it was even three years ago.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

 

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Okay. How did you both come together to creatively solve an issue that came up when you started this project and continued through it?

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

I think it goes hand in hand with of how we were evaluating the project based on some real-time data. We were collecting feedback about where we're at on our waterfall tasks for data migration, integration development, extensions, reports, and design. Then outside of our scheduled meetings and the formal documentation of that, what helped us steer it was the informal things, like dropping into Mike's office or just giving him a quick call. When we had challenges maybe with a third-party partner outside of Sunrise, outside of Infro, we would just have a quick conversation and say, Here's where I think the issue is. You could help me by doing this. Mike would do the same thing to me. It would be helpful if we tag team this and help support each other in a way where you set the agenda this way. Here's where you might come in an example and a talking point, and then that collaboration, you don't get in a dashboard or a formal meeting. You get in just understanding what we think is our common goal, and then not hiding behind emails about here's a status or whatever like that. It's more about having an open dialog along the way to go on the journey together.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I will say, and this may sound corny, but we We have a partnership. Again, I've been doing this for a long time, and I know there's some that vendors are they. It's us versus they. We don't look at it as that. Alex's success in Sunrise is going to be our success here and vice versa. Like you said, it's more than just... He's an Atlanta Braves fan. I'm a Philly's fan, and I called him. But that's... We're That's our relationship. In the same vein, I could tell him I have a problem on a system and we'll talk about it in that same conversation. I think that means.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Yeah, definitely. All right. One more question I think that we have here. Do you have a favorite memory from this process that you'd like to share with the folks?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Yeah, when we went live and it was over. How's that?

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

Absolutely.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Yeah, went live, everything was good.

 

Alex Hunt, Sunrise

I was happy for that. I guess keeping in touch with everybody afterwards as well. If I had some projects where if somebody retired and they share their personal email with afterwards, it's part of the project. Just being able to keep in touch with everybody. And of course, Mike got in a Philly's barb because they just beat the Braves in the World Series. But getting to know everybody outside of just the project and keeping up with them after the fact, after being able to share in the success of a go-live together is like going in the trenches together and coming out the other side. It's a great joint culture of the team, the core team.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

I will say that there are employees, folks at Renfro that have come up to me and thank me for allowing them to be part of this project because it's skin in the game. When you ask people and give them accountability to do things, when it's successful, they feel like they're part of that success. No one told them to do something. They did it and they made this project successful. There's There's a lot of people that feel that way. I think that's why we're moving in the right direction because it was successful. We're seeing the fruits of our labor, and it makes people feel good.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Yeah, less Excel, right?

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Yeah, less Excel.

 

Beth Hughes, AAFA

Thank you, thanks, you guys. It looks like we've covered all of our questions for today. As we close, I would like to remind you of AFA's upcoming events. I also want to highlight that registration is now open for the 2023 Product Safety and Compliance seminar, which will take place February 7 and 8 at the Westin Long Beach. We hope that you will consider joining us there. I really would love to thank our speakers again, Alex Hunt and Mike Everly, on behalf of AAFA. We would like to thank you for joining this session, and thank you to Sunrise Technologies for sponsoring today's program. An email with a link to the recording from today's program will be sent to you. Thank you again for joining us, and have a great rest of your day.

 

Mike Everly, Renfro

Thank you, thank you. Bye.