Jim Prevo

To install an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) at Green Mountain Coffee Inc., Jim Prevo had to take his team – and his company – on a risky, three-year journey.

“An ERP implementation is like the corporate equivalent of a brain transplant,” says Prevo, CIO at the wholesaler and retailer of specialty coffees. “We pulled the plug on every company application and moved to PeopleSoft (software). The risk was certainly disruption of business, because if you do not do ERP properly, you can kill your company, guaranteed.”

But it had to be done. Green Mountain had operated on homegrown applications that had “run out of gas” as the company grew revenue 30% annually since 1993. By 1996, the firm was unable to manage its inventories electronically. That meant keeping extra-high inventories to ensure orders could be filled – and even then, they sometimes weren’t.

“What was at stake was our long-term ability to grow,” Prevo says.

But ERP wasn’t the project that management had asked Prevo’s department to undertake. The initial plan was for a five- to 12-month in-house revamping of the company’s software. Believing that wasn’t enough to solve Green Mountain’s problems, Prevo had to sell management on a three-year ERP project instead.

He managed to do so even though he had to explain that installing an ERP system was a bet-the-company strategy: If it didn’t work, the company could be out of business.

“A CIO or IT leader must make the judgment of when the risk is low enough to make the jump,” Prevo says.

To make the project work, Prevo had to be a leader without being the overall boss of everyone on the cross-functional team. Luckily, he had the background. “I used to be a software engineer at Digital Equipment . . . so I had a great deal of experience managing teams where I had influence but not authority,” Prevo says.

Once the PeopleSoft project had begun, Prevo found himself trying to keep the implementation team’s spirits up, despite some of the glitches that come with an ERP installation. For Green Mountain, that included online sales functions that didn’t work properly and servers that were swamped by the new workloads.

“Jim was in a leadership role in this project, and he added a tremendous degree of insight and support,” says Robert Stiller, CEO of Green Mountain Coffee in Waterbury, Vt.

Alexander is a freelance writer in Edina, Minn.