Vanilla Project

What is Vanilla Project and what does this mean for the business?

As you may be aware, a cross-functional team within Colart is working on Project Vanilla. The project is all about simplification of how we financially and operationally plan the flow of products around the Colart Group.

We currently have a process which has CIHL at the centre of all product flows, creating complexity and reduced transparency that are not appropriate for a group of Colart’s size. Project Vanilla eliminates CIHL from the flow of products and in so doing creates a direct financial and operational flow between the manufacturing entities (e.g. Colart Le Mans) and the distribution/sales entities (e.g. Colart Italy). As such the project touches many parts of the Colart organisation.

What has been done so far?

1. A project team (see details below) has been set up to ensure we take into account all business expectations and requirements.
2. Risks/Challenges/Opportunities have been listed by all the team members for their departments to ensure they are taken into account into the project plan.
3. A clear action plan with key milestones has been defined with the different departments. The main stakeholders to deliver the requested system being IT and Finance.

What will be done the coming months?

At this stage, the target date for the cutover to switch to the new IT system is the last week of December 2019 to be ready for the 1st of January 2020. The cutover will require 4 days with no activity in every divisions which are working with M3 to allow for the different stakeholders to implement the new system. The main steps for the next few months are:

• IT: UAT Wave 1 US, UAT Wave 2 for all DCs and Le Mans later in the year, implement the new Financial rules (Transfer Prices, Standard Costs etc…) in the system on time for budget in August 2019, implement a new way to identify code in the system to be able to segregate the stock and allocate to different markets…
• Finance: Finalise to define the new Financial Rules…
• Operations: Plan the cutover at the end of the year from an Operational side with DCs and Manufacturing sites…
• Procurement: Advise all freight forwarders and suppliers of this change…

Who is working on this?

Mark Barratt, Toby Russell and Jonathan Spight are the sponsors for the Vanilla project and the project progress is reported to them on a monthly basis.

A project team is meeting every 2 weeks to ensure the whole business is aware of the scope of the project, aligned on the project progress and action plan, can raise and solve any risks/challenges/opportunities in order to be ready for the cutover planned date at the end of the year 2019.

Project Management: Marine Hammer

Global IT: Claudio Toledo, Eric Cook

Global Finance: Mark Brown, Mark Nisbet, Mike Fishburn, Liam O’Sullivan, Philippe Chauvin, Mark Triano and Stephanie Casertano

Global Legal: Sarwar Zaman

Global SIOP: Bruno Lebourdais

Le Mans Site: Dominique Murzeau

Global Procurement: Gregory Malet

Global Regulatory: Jennifer O’Brien

UK Operations: Paul Woodward & Shane Williams

US Operations: Sanjay Marwaha

Commercial: Jasper Van Der Wurff

The people above represent you during these bi-weekly meetings, so please feel free to contact them directly if you have any specific questions or concerns you would like to raise. You can also send your questions/comments to: news@colart.com

We now wish the best of luck to the team to implement these changes as smoothly as possible for the business.

Best regards,

Marine Hammer

Project Manager Vanilla Project