Rebuilding a Failed Implementation With Two Months on the Clock

The Situation

The client's revenue came from a mix of commercial aerospace, defense, and high-end adjacent businesses spanning more than 25 product lines. The executive team knew their Excel-based forecasting system no longer met the organization's needs. They wanted an application customized for budgeting and planning that would let decision makers generate, edit, and view the reports they relied on.

A Big Four professional services firm was selected to lead the OPBCS implementation.

The Challenge

After six months of work, the Big Four project leadership presented the new application. Stakeholders determined it did not meet their needs.

That left less than two months before the project deadline, with nothing usable to show for the six months already spent. The client came to us to rebuild the application in line with the original objectives, inside what remained of the timeline.

Our Approach

The first step was to gain a comprehensive understanding of the client's requirements and their data landscape, which is precisely the step that had been skipped.

The build required loading ten years of historical data for trend reporting and dashboarding, plus two years of historical forecast data and one year of historical budget data out of the client's legacy systems. Data was migrated from a BSO application to ASO for stronger reporting and ad-hoc capability, and to support development of custom currency translation logic.

The Results

The forecasting project was completed successfully in under two months, within the client's original project timeline, and exceeded all budget goals.

The delivered application let users input current budget data and run accurate trend, variance, and year-over-year reports. Efficiency improved by more than 20% companywide.

"The success of our budgeting and planning project is due, in large part, to the technical expertise and proven experience of the team. We hired them with only 2 months left before deployment, and they put us back on track to meet all delivery requirements. For our next software implementation, we will be going directly to them."

Finance Director, Aerospace & Defense Manufacturer

Why It Mattered

A rejected application two months from deadline is not a technical problem. It is an organizational one, and it usually ends in a delayed launch and a difficult conversation with the board. Delivering inside the original timeline meant the client absorbed none of the cost of someone else's six months.