Client Overview
Our client is a growing, private equity–backed company that went live on Oracle Cloud roughly a year ago. To protect the implementation, leadership made a deliberate call to hold off on integrating recently acquired companies into the new platform until the core system was stable. That was the right call at the time but it also meant demand didn’t disappear, it queued up. A year in, the company is now working through that backlog while simultaneously figuring out how to operate as a larger, more complex organization than the one the system was originally built for.
The Challenge
With the initial Oracle implementation stable, our client faced a second, less visible challenge: maturing from “we just went live” to “we run this like an enterprise.” Specifically:
- A growing backlog. Integration work that had been intentionally deferred during implementation was now stacking up, alongside new requests from the business.
- No consistent intake process. There was no structured way to capture, evaluate, and prioritize this backlog against day-to-day demand.
- Uneven business engagement. The muscle for engaging functional stakeholders had been built around the implementation project, not around steady-state operations — so it needed to evolve.
- Delivery consistency at a larger scale. As scope expanded to include acquired entities, the company needed shared standards to keep delivery quality consistent across a more complex environment.
In short: the system had matured, but the operating model around it hadn’t caught up yet.
Our Approach
Notch Above embedded a dedicated team member to lead the ERP function through this next phase. Over the past several months, we’ve been standing up a lightweight, repeatable operating model built on three pillars:
- Business Engagement — building consistent, ongoing touchpoints with functional leaders, shifting the relationship from “project mode” to steady, sustained partnership.
- Demand Intake — creating a single, structured process to capture and prioritize both the deferred integration backlog and new requests, so decisions can be made against a full, visible picture rather than whoever asks loudest.
- Delivery Excellence — introducing shared standards and practices so outcomes stay consistent as scope expands to include the newly integrated entities.
Alongside this foundational work, we’re also helping the business see itself more clearly; building critical reporting dashboards and improving financial visibility so leadership has better data to manage the business day to day, not just during the integration.
At the same time, we’re delivering targeted wins the business can feel right away; including a key financial process automation (ACH) and performance improvements to core systems. These early wins are building credibility for the new operating model while the harder, longer-term work of tackling the integration backlog gets underway.
Where Things Stand
Four months in, this is very much a work in progress but moving in a great direction. Rather than pausing to fix the operating model before tackling any real work, we’re building both at the same time:
- The intake and prioritization process is taking shape, giving leadership a clearer view of the full backlog for the first time
- Business engagement is becoming more consistent, laying the groundwork for steadier partnership going forward
- New reporting dashboards and improved financial visibility are giving the business better data to manage day-to-day operations
- Early, high-impact wins are building trust and momentum
- The heavier lift of integrating acquired entities into the platform is still ahead, now with a structure in place to tackle it in a prioritized, sustainable way
Key Takeaway
Going live is a milestone. It’s not the finish line. For PE-backed companies that intentionally defer integration work to protect an implementation, the real work often starts after go-live and it takes time to build the operating model that can absorb it. Notch Above is helping this client lay that foundation, delivering meaningful wins along the way, with the larger integration effort still to come.