Sigma Wireless

5.4 Planned Outcome

5.4.1 Benefits for Sigma Wireless

As implementation is still in progress it is too early to isolate specific benefits. However, at the business planning stage a number of benefits for Sigma of pursuing a solution sell were identified:

• Potentially higher contract values, as antennas tend to be the low cost items of the solutions. Therefore, Sigma should be able to get better margins on its own manufactured products.
• The streamlining of the business and the ease at which sales people should be able to access information will mean that they are able to maintain several higher maintenance customers and potentially cover a larger geographical area. This means more and larger customers and a greater reach and profile for Sigma Wireless. Sales people are projected to save between ten and fifteen hours per week on information retrieval.
• The formation of alliances with other significant players in the market is projected to enhance the Sigma Wireless profile.

5.4.2 Benefits for customers and suppliers

Customer demand – customers are more and more looking for complete subsystem solutions, and are less likely to remain satisfied with having to build and maintain multiple relationships with multiple suppliers across what they would regard as being a single solution.

It will be necessary to revisit Sigma Wireless at the conclusion of the implementation to see whether all the projected benefits have been achieved.

5.5 Budget

The project was partially funded by Enterprise Ireland's eBusiness Acceleration fund.

5.6 Set backs and difficulties

1. Consistency is crucial
The Sigma Wireless project team has been the same throughout the eBusiness implementation and the same team was involved in successfully implementing the ERP system previously. This consistency has been crucial to the successful operation of the team.

However, there were some personnel changes on the Octagon side. This resulted in a ‘grey area’ that emerged around October 2001. Certain issues had to be readdressed which Sigma Wireless estimate added an additional six to eight weeks to the project. The learning was that consistency of project staff is critical to a smooth implementation.

2. Live testing
There was also some concern that Octagon wanted to hand over the system to Sigma Wireless as ‘finished’ prior to live testing being completed. The Sigma Group IT team were unhappy with this and uncomfortable about taking ownership prior to successful live testing.

During the latter stages of the implementation the team found some source code issues and bugs in the Microsoft Sharepoint software. This underlined the need for a period of live operation prior to final testing and handover from the consultants to ensure the system is robust and free of problems.