Steve Griffis
PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONAL
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From early 2003 to the spring of 2008, I was a senior project manager at the world's largest speciality clothing retailer, Gap Inc. I worked on laying the core ERP foundation for Gap's later brand and geographic expansion - implementing Oracle Financials, upgrading PeopleSoft HCM and implementing North American Payroll for 145,000 employees.
Laying the ERP Foundation
at Gap Inc.
"We've just run out of numbers." That's how a business analyst described the current state of Gap's accounting system when I arrived in the spring of 2003.
As it turned out, the "numbers" problem with Gap's back office systems, was just the tip of the iceberg. Gap had reached the $1 billion mark in annual sales two years earlier, making it the largest retail clothing company in the world, but its foundational systems hadn't kept pace.
The global giant was relying on a hodge-podge of shop-worn financial applications to manage its retail empire. In the midst of a retail boom, Gap was hamstrung in its ability to add new brands, or even effectively manage the triumvirate of iconic brands that accounted for it's phenominal success. Its ability to compete with brash domestic newcomers like Abercrombie and Fitch and Ann Taylor, and global competitors like H&M, hung in the balance.
The company's senior management had started to address the problem, licensing Oracle's Financials, Purchasing, iProcurement and other modules two years earlier, in July 2001, but the program to implement the products, aptly named New Global Financials (NGF), had hit several roadblocks; chief among them was how to structure its chart of accounts.
With the departure of Mickey Drexler in September 2002 Gap found itself with a new CEO, Paul Pressler. Pressler had come from the Disney Company, where he was responsible for their retail and theme park operations. Four months later, in January 2003, Byron Pollitt joined Gap as CFO, also from Disney.
Immediately Pressler and Pollitt worked
together to get the New Global Financals
project back on the front burner. In early March Pollitt was the featured speaker for an all-hands kickoff. The leaders brought in Oracle Consulting and IBM Global Services to help deliver the system. Oracle immediately began to build a project management office (PMO), and I joined the PMO in the spring of 2003 to build and manage the project plan day-to-day.
For most of the summer of 2003, Gap's CIO, Ken Harris, had been on leave due to illness. In October 2003, a replacement was found, and Michael Tasooji joined Gap as CIO, having worked with Mr. Pollitt at Disney's theme parks division. The North America rollout of NGF was about to start user acceptance testing when Tasooji came on board.
Gap Inc. is a leading global specialty retailer offering clothing, accessories and personal care products for men, women, children and babies under the Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piperlime and Athleta brand names.
Fiscal 2008 sales:
$14.5 billion.
Stores:
3,100+ stores in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Japan and Ireland
Franchise Agreements:
Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East
Paul Pressler
CEO
Byron Pollitt
CFO
Michael Tasooji
EVP and CIO
"By the fall of 2003, with the executive management team, key integrators and PMO in place, Gap's New Global Financials (NGF) project began to take shape."
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I met weekly with the NGF team leads -
business, technical and change management -
and fleshed out the NGF project plan, and began
tracking milestones, deliverables and issues. Gap's
time-tracking system, ITOP, was based on a customized version of Microsoft Project Server, so I was able to baseline the plan and track actual hours (and dollars) against the plan and report our budget position weekly.
In the fall, work was under way to revamp the complicated library of batch processes that fed other Gap systems and a reporting instance of Financials. I lent my expertise in Microsoft Project to build a PERT chart that showed the dependencies between hundreds of processes and calculated the critical path and elapsed time for daily, weekly, and monthly runs. .
The Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) had been enacted barely two years earlier, but Gap's auditors had already established compliance guidelines for finance-related IT projects, and and NGF audit was a sure thing. In September I started to review the functional and techncial specifications for the hundereds of interfaces, customizations, reports, and extensions that NGF was to bring into production. I also ensured that all of the required approvals for these deliverables had been obtained, and built a repository of the final documents and the approvals for the audit team.
Final testing for NGF's North America rollout took
place during the holidays, and in February 2004 NGF
went live without incident. Work continued on the
international rollout, scheduled for a year later, in
February 2005. User acceptance and catalog
maintenance of the iProcurement application was still a problem, but over the course of the summer a task force assigned to these problems resolved most of the nagging issues.
No longer bound by the limitations of the old accounting system, Gap's senior strategists aggressively embarked on an expansion of the company's brands and global distribution. While NGF was moving into production, Pollitt and Pressler were readying Fourth & Towne, the company's fourth traditional retail
concept., launching the first store
in August 2005. Gap followed the
next year with Piperlime, an
online shoe and handbag
emporium. Earlier this year the
online brand Athleta made it's
debut, specilizing in athletic and
ski wear for women.
In February 2005 the global rollout of NGF was complete, including operations in Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan in NGF's global instance.
Forth & Towne, the company's fourth traditional retail concept, was launched on August 24, 2005, featuring apparel targeted toward women 35 and older.
Piperlime, Gap's online store for shoes and handbags, recenetly added women's clothing and accessories to its line.
Athleta is Gap's online store for women's athetic and ski apparel and accessories.
ERP Project Portfolio
From 2000 to 2009, I managed six ERP projects for three Fortune 500 companies: Franklin Templeton Investments, Gap Inc., and Robert Half International, with direct budget responsibility totalling over $50 million.
Franklin Templeton
Investments
Public Company: BEN
Industry: Financial Services
Employees: 6,400
Fortune 500 Rank: 41
Robert Half
International
Public Company: RHI
Industry: Professional Staffing
Employees: 15,000
Fortune 500 Rank: 491
Gap Inc.
Public Company: GPS
Industry: Speciality Retailer
Employees: 134,000
Fortune 500 Rank: 178
Oracle Retail Price V12
Upgrade & Localized
Markdowns
PeopleSoft Finanicals and
HCM 8 Upgrade
PeopleSoft HCM 9 Merge
and Upgrade
HCM 7.5 Implementation
PeopleSoft HCM 8 Upgrade
and Payroll Implementation
Oracle Financials V11
Global Implementation
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Click on a project name for details
PeopleSoft 7.5 Financials and HCM Implementation
Directed the global upgrade and enhancements for PeopleSoft HCM and Financials from V7.5 to V8 (June 2002 to March 2003)
Infrastructure Planning and Rollout; established the initial global high-availability infrastructure for PeopleSoft HCM and Financials V7.5, March - June 2000
Major Releases
Project Scope: Establish infrastructure; implement PeopleSoft Financials and HCMVersion 7.5; rollout to corporate, then subsidiaries Franklin Bank, Franklin Capital Corp. and Fiduciary Trust
PeopleSoft Modules: HR: Human Resources, Payroll Interface, Base Benefits, ePay, eBenefits, eProfile and eProfile Manager; Financials: GL, AP, AR, FA, Purchasing, eProcurement,
Implementation Partner: PeopleSoft Consulting
Budget: $4.8MM
Hours: 64500
Team: 18 FTEs
Duration: 30 months (2000-2002)
PeopleSoft 8 Financials and HCM Upgrade
Directed the global upgrade and enhancements for PeopleSoft HCM and Financials from V7.5 to V8
(June 2002 to March 2003)
"Thanks for your excellent teamwork, planning and execution. A very smooth cutover in a very complex environment - this is a major achievement. Well done!"
Richard Preece
Senior Vice President
Franklin Templeton Investments
"I would like to commend Steve Griffis and team on the OUTSTANDING deployment. The teamwork was one of the keys to success and Steve built team attitude throughout the process.
The communication was also outstanding throughout the project. This is the kind of project we are all proud to be a part of!"
Bob Trank
Project Manager-DPE
IBM Global Services
Project Scope:
Upgrade: PeopleSoft HRMS 7.51 to 8.3 and PeopleSoft FDM 7.53 to 8.4; Implement eProfile, eProfile Managers Desktop, eCompensation, eCompensation Managers Desktop, eDevelopment and eBenefits
PeopleSoft Modules: HCM: Human Resources, Base Benefits, Payroll Interface, eProfile, eProfile Managers Desktop, eCompensation, eCompensation Managers Desktop, eDevelopment and eBenefits; PeopleSoft Financials: GL, AP, AR, AM, Purchasing, eProcurement
Budget: $5.2MM
Hours: 42,300
Team: 21 FTEs
Duration: 12 months (May 02- April 03))
Oracle Financials 11 Implementation
As a member of the Project Management Office, managed a 5,000-line project plan (MS Project) and other key project deliverables for a three-year, $80M global implementation of Oracle Financials. This implementation allowed Gap to manage their business more effectively, aggressively control costs, and decrease the total cost of ownership of their Financials applications.
The project plan was rolled up for executive reporting and used by team leads and the overall project manager for week-to-week management and reporting, critical path management, resource leveling, time reporting, and monthly financial forecasts and accruals.
Working with team leads and the overall project manager, responsible for creating and maintaining project plans in Microsoft Project for a global Oracle Financials implementation. Plans were used for critical path management, resource leveling, batch scheduling, production cutover, time reporting, project funding and monthly financial forecasts and accruals. Produced high-level project timelines and project reports for senior management; also authored the weekly PMO status report.
Implement Oracle Financals Verison 11
Oracle Modules:
GL, AP, AR, FA, iProcurement
Implementation Partners: Oracle Consulting, IBM Global Services, Covansys
Budget: $80MM
Hours: 584,000
Team: 190 FTEs Duration: 26 months (2003-2005)
Byron Pollitt, Gap's CFO, penned a thank-you to the NGF PMO after the North America launch.
Click Image to expand
Exceed Award
Gap New Global Financials
Outstanding Contribution to Project Success 2005
"The NGF Project Leadership Team would like to thank you for your incredible contribution to the successful implementation of New Global Financials. The finance organization can now operate with a common language across all financial functions and countries. This is a monumental Gap Inc. achievement!"
NGF Project Leadership Team
PeopleSoft HCM V8 Upgrade
North America Payroll Implementation
Employee and Manager Self-Service
Implementation
People Systems_Gap Inc.
This project focused on bringing payroll in-house from ADP, and the introduction of employee and manager self-service using PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal and LDAP integration. The project was delivered on-time with less than a 3% budget variance. Most important, the system met the goal of payroll perfect pay on the first payroll.
PeopleSystems_Gap Project Manager
Reduced headcount and HR support costs, brought strategic applications back into vendor support, aligned application infrastructure and security with corporate standards.
"An incredibly successful
payroll implementation..."
Michael Tassooji
Executive Vice President and
Chief Information Officer, Gap Inc.
PeopleSystems Go-Live
January 4, 2006 (:55)
"This is a tremendous effort,
I couldn't be more pleased!"
Kathy Wilk
Executive Vice President
Finance and Administration, Gap Inc.
January 6, 2006 (:35)
Upgrade PeopleSoft HCM from version 7.5 to version 8.2; bring payroll in-house, implement Enterprise Portal and LDAP integration
PeopleSoft Modules: Human Resources, Payroll for North America, Benefits Admin, ePay, eBenefits, eProfile and eProfile Manager, Enterprise Portal
Implementation Partners: BearingPoint, Oracle Consulting
Budget: $28MM
Hours: 225,000
Team: 90 FTEs
Duration: 13 months (2005-2006)
"In our first year on PS8
we've issued 3.6 million
paychecks/direct deposits
to employees..."
Year 1 Update
January 2007
weve issued 3.6 million
paychecks/ direct deposits
to employees, hired 158,000
new employees, and processed
in-house payroll tax data on 280,000
cumulative employees over the course of the calendar year.
In addition, we exceeded our projected 2006 budget savings and achieved substantial expense and FTE reductions as a result of bringing payroll in-house and leveraging PeopleSoft 8 functionality.
A success such as this really does take a team. Please pass my thanks and appreciation on to the many team members in your organization that supported the original PeopleSystems project."
Jay Anderson
Senior Director
Customer Shared Services Center
"Congratulations to all! This is a terrific success story on a complex cross-functional initiative to bring much-needed foundational capability to Gap."
Chief Information Officer
"Steve and I worked together on Gap's HR upgrade project. Steve demonstrated excellent project management skills.
He is organized, communicates well and can differentiate project noise from serious issues. He worked well in a matrix environment, using interpersonal skills to keep the project on track."
Tom Weir
Director, Enterprise Support,
Oracle Corporation
"Steve was a major contributor to the success of the project. He worked tirelessly in managing the plan and the finances..."
IT Senior Director
Annual Performance Review
I received two awards from senior management for my work on this project. Click on image to enlarge.
Oracle Retail Price V12 Upgrade (SaaS)
Application Move to New Data Center
Localized Markdown Implementation
Analytics Update
The Oracle Retail Price Update
project was a fast-track upgrade
plus implementation of new features
in a Software as a Service (SaaS)
solution hosted by Oracle OnDemand.
New application features, including localized markdowns that created store clusters and advanced analytics for cluster-specific price changes, allowed Gap analysts to fine-tune markdowns for its Gap and Old Navy brands.
The project went live just prior to the markdowns for the 2007 holiday shopping season. On May 22, 2008, Gap reported a 40% rise in its first-quarter profitto $249 million, or 34 cents a share, attributing the rise to efforts to, control inventory to help limit profit-eroding discounts and offset declining sales.
My Role: Oracle Retail Price Project Manager
Led the fast-track Update of Oracle Retail Price for two brands that contributed significantly to a 40% increase in profit in the first quarter in production.
Managed a virtual team from eight organizations in ten locations: Oracle Consulting, Oracle OnDemand, Gap Operating Strategy, Gap Brand, Outlet Brand, Gap IT, IBM and Covansys. Delivered under budget and on time to meet retail calendar deadline.
Upgrade Oracle Retail Price from Version 4 to Version 12; Implement Localized Markdowns for and update analytics for two brands
Oracle Module:
Oracle Retail Price Version 12
SaaS Partner:
Oracle On Demand, Austin, TX Data Center
Implementation Partners:
Oracle Consulting
Oracle On Demand
Covansys
Click image to enlarge
"Thank you so much for your hard work in making this happen. Our brand business leaders are very pleased and we should be able to see significant margin improvements as a result of this application." Wanda Ma Gap Brand CIO"This is a big win for us. Thank you for staying on top of this project and resolving the issues so quickly." Gap BrandBusiness Lead
"Thank you so much for your hard work in making this happen. Our brand business leaders are very pleased and we should be able to see significant margin improvements as a result of this application."
Wanda Ma
Gap Brand CIO
"This is a big win for us. Thank you for staying on top of this project and resolving the issues so quickly."
Gap Brand
Business Lead
Gap's Retail Price application is a SaaS implementation hosted by Oracle On Demand at Oracle's
Austin, TX Data Center. Take a video tour of the facility with Oracle On Demand SVP, Mike Beck.
PeopleSoft HCM 9 Upgrade
Merge Two Instances
Employee and Manager Self Service Implementation
New Development and Production Environments
Virtual Servers for Web and Application Server Layers
User Productivity Kit
HCM9 Corporate Upgrade Project Manager
Business Driver:
Reduce HR headcount and HR support costs
Align application infrastructure and security with corporate standards.
Upgrade HCM from version 8.0 to version 9.0, implement Employee and Manager Self-Service
PeopleSoft Modules: Human Resources, Payroll for North America, Benefits Admin, ePay, eBenefits, eProfile and eProfile Manager, User Productivity Kit (UPK)
3rd Party Applications: Symmetry State W-4, Grey Sparling Solutions Desktop Single Sign-on
Implementation Partner: Serenity Infotech (onshore and offshore)
I was nominated by senior management for a corporate Circle of Excellence award duing my work on this project.
Click image to enlarge.
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