Progression through your career is not an easy task. It entails a lot of hard work, dealing with professional and personal challenges, learning the systems and new techniques, and sometimes extended working hours. But with the right mix of focus, enthusiasm, leadership and drive to reach your goal, you eventually get to accomplish your tasks.
During my career so far, there have been some situations which had been very demanding. Those conditions demanded extraordinary working hours, a lot of learning about a new system, hard work, and most importantly, digging through the records and reconstruction of the damaged records.
It all started with the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX 12 at one of my business units. Just at the time when were had finalized our planning for the implementation phase, we learned that three key employees were about to switch their jobs. Those were the professionals who had been with the company for over a decade and were a huge information source for us. Upon dealing with them, we learned that they were not comfortable with using the new software and did not want to stay.
They had very attractive offers from other companies, and it was impossible to stop them. With them leaving the team, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Store were totally unattended. Bringing in new resources was also not of much use since they would have needed to be trained for the tasks and the new system as well. Inducting new staff at the critical time of implementing a new IT system is never advisable.
Without these three key staff members, we were forced to get into the ERP implementation phase without enough support, and this proved to be a huge challenge. All our planning was rendered null and void, and we had to work very differently as compared to what we had originally planned.
The very first challenge in the data entry phase was the incorporation of opening balances into the new system. When we started the due diligence process over the modular data of store, accounts receivable, and accounts payables, a number of anomalies were found. To make things even worse, we soon learned that there had been a fire at the location of the server of the old Information system and all the data was lost. The fire had very badly damaged the disks containing the date.
Under these circumstances, I was pushed to work my way backward through the paper records. It was a very long, exhausting, frustrating, and demanding process. I had to work day and night to meet my targets as the senior management was not willing to relax the deadline of system implementation. I had to reconstruct the data by entering it into the new regime. While entering the data into the system, a lot of network issues were found which further delayed my tasks. At one time, I was so frustrated that I was about to put a resignation from my team lead.
But my team lead handled me well and gave me two days off so that I could do a little unwinding and resume my work with a new drive. It had been particularly helpful to me. From all this experience, I learned that we should never get to kick start a major assignment until all the staff members are involved in it wholeheartedly. Because it is the people, who have to do the work and operate the machines and the software. If people are not participating in the process, it will only lead to disasters and crisis situations as I have explained. After long working hours, and countless accounts of disappointments and frustrations, we eventually succeeded in delivering the task of system implementation within the decided timeline.
