Though found­ed some years ear­li­er, Vic­tro­la didn’t release the first ver­sion of its famous name­sake record play­er until 1906. Since then, cement­ing its sta­tus as a lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­er of audio prod­ucts, the com­pa­ny has passed through mul­ti­ple own­ers while main­tain­ing the men­tal­i­ty of a startup. 

“We call our­selves the world’s old­est start­up,” explained Adam Schnei­der, SVP of Dig­i­tal Strat­e­gy. So, when it was time to trans­form from SAP ECC to a new ERP sys­tem, ​“change wasn’t a scary thing for us. We’re dri­ven to keep going and get better.”

From ECC to ERP

Schnei­der joined Vic­tro­la four years ago, when the company’s ECC instance ​“was very sta­ble, but it wasn’t the sys­tem for where they want­ed to go.” Among oth­er things, the on-premise sys­tem required a mid-mar­ket com­pa­ny with­out a large IT depart­ment to wor­ry ​“about con­nec­tiv­i­ty every sin­gle day to make sure VPNs were up and run­ning. So, I came in and built a roadmap to get us to par with tech­nol­o­gy and define the sys­tems for what they want­ed to accom­plish. The end was a new ERP sys­tem, because we were up against a main­te­nance dead­line with our cur­rent system.”

Beyond the dead­line pres­sure, Vic­tro­la want­ed a sys­tem that could scale with its ever-evolv­ing needs. ​“We eval­u­at­ed mul­ti­ple ERP sys­tems and providers and land­ed with the Cloud ERP pub­lic edi­tion,” Schnei­der said, ​“because we could make it as sim­ple or as com­plex as pos­si­ble based on what we want­ed to acti­vate, and it was main­tained by SAP on the infrastructure.”

Get­ting the Tran­si­tion­al Buy-In

When Schnei­der was brought in to assist with the tran­si­tion, his top pri­or­i­ty to make sure that what­ev­er sys­tem Vic­tro­la decid­ed on served the busi­ness lead­ers who’d be using it most. ​“Main­tain­ing an ECC sys­tem is not cheap, and it requires a very tech­ni­cal skill set,” Schnei­der explained. ​“While I love a tech­ni­cal skill set, we want­ed our busi­ness users to help define the sys­tem, so it’s much more main­tain­able by a busi­ness team as opposed to a very tech­ni­cal team.”

Despite his pri­or expe­ri­ence with the com­pa­ny, decid­ing to con­tin­ue with SAP wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a giv­en. ​“I’ve been work­ing in the SAP ecosys­tem for almost 20 years now, so that was just a good net­work of folks that I know — but it wasn’t about who I knew or knew could do it well,” Schnei­der said. ​“We land­ed with them because they spoke busi­ness.” He explained what he meant by that: ​“There are a lot of part­ners out there that love to throw acronyms and tech­nol­o­gy around. If you come from Sap­phire, you learn a new acronym every year. Our busi­ness is not at Sap­phire, does not have their fin­ger on the pulse of SAP, and they don’t know what the Autonomous Suite is — but they know busi­ness.” He need­ed some­one that could speak that lan­guage and then help trans­late it, so his team land­ed with Sysko­plan Reply. 

To help fig­ure out what sys­tem would best suit Vic­tro­la, the com­pa­ny con­duct­ed a dig­i­tal dis­cov­ery assess­ment (DDA). ​“We brought in our busi­ness leads from the ground of this project,” Schnei­der said. ​“This wasn’t an IT project, and I did not want to take full respon­si­bil­i­ty. 75% of our project was busi­ness leads, the oth­er 25% were IT con­sul­tants. I was there to exe­cute for them and make sure that it hap­pened, not to pick their sys­tem or process­es.” At the end of the process, the scope emerged direct­ly from the DDA, with a devi­a­tion that Schnei­der esti­mat­ed was no more than 10% at the end of the process. 

Schnei­der added that the changeover was by no means turnkey: ​“There were some things that we had to bend away from the stan­dard method­ol­o­gy.” One nec­es­sary devi­a­tion from SAP’s tem­plate involved a change that would have cre­at­ed a great deal of addi­tion­al work for the finance depart­ment. ​“I wasn’t going to rec­om­mend we increase staff just to sup­port a new sys­tem, because that is the oppo­site of what we’re try­ing to do,” Schnei­der not­ed. The solu­tion required ​“get­ting cre­ative with some of our con­sul­tants and my background.”

The Tran­si­tion­al Process

While the imple­men­ta­tion was ready to go dur­ing Victrola’s Q4, the tran­si­tion didn’t actu­al­ly take place until the fol­low­ing year. ​“We’re in retail and dis­tri­b­u­tion, so Q4 is our Super Bowl,” Schnei­der explained. ​“That peri­od involves prepar­ing part­ners at big box stores for their prod­ucts, as well as ful­fill­ing direct-to-con­sumer orders (DTC).”

Prepar­ing for the tran­si­tion took six months, after which imple­men­ta­tion was put on pause until the busy sea­son took place. Then, after Christ­mas, Vic­tro­la jumped into the tran­si­tion head-on. ​“Our busi­ness leads brought their teams into that sys­tem ready to do some train­ing and hands-on exer­cis­ing, so it got them famil­iar with what was com­ing,” Schnei­der said. ​“We didn’t have a mas­sive train­ing bud­get, so we were more focused on man­ag­ing the change. We start­ed migrat­ing data and con­nec­tions over. We had a cutover plan that our COO actu­al­ly was super-involved in, so the ener­gy was there.” That’s not to say the tran­si­tion was flaw­less: ​“We had our hic­cups. Our biggest chal­lenges were actu­al­ly inte­gra­tions: we have a lot of con­nect­ed part­ners that we work with. If you don’t meet their needs, things snowball.”

But by and large, the process went smooth­ly, with most prob­lems ironed out after a month. ​“We’re not going to be at 100% on day one, but if you’re hit­ting that 80% mark and work­ing through some kinks, that’s okay,” Schnei­der said. ​“There’s noth­ing in it we can’t fig­ure out. Just last month, we found some­thing that we made a mis­take on, but it’s just that order-cash cycle — you don’t see it until the very end, right? We found an invoic­ing issue with one of our cus­tomers, and we had to cor­rect it. Hon­est­ly, that could have also hap­pened in a 10-year-old sys­tem. We’re real­iz­ing so much val­ue from on-demand data and mak­ing this trans­for­ma­tion. We’re set up for it now and feel very con­fi­dent going forward.” 

Mea­sur­ing Results

With lim­it­ed IT resources, Schnei­der chose not to fix­ate on cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple met­rics and KPIs. In Victrola’s case, mea­sur­ing suc­cess was sim­ple: ​“We didn’t want to see busi­ness dis­rup­tion or decline in rev­enue. We can’t let this busi­ness lose its momen­tum. There’s more we want to do in regards to engage­ment in the sys­tem and adop­tion, but I wasn’t that wor­ried about it. Our team knew that this was their sys­tem and they were going to latch onto it. We’re real­iz­ing so much val­ue from on-demand data and mak­ing this transformation.”

For the future, Schnei­der said that Vic­tro­la is ​“look­ing at AI like every­one else.” The com­pa­ny has a foun­da­tion that it can exe­cute on, with a cloud ERP and clean data, and teams have already start­ed dis­cus­sions with SAP on what AI looks like and use cas­es on imple­men­ta­tion. ​“I strong­ly believe that we’ll be talk­ing next year about a use case that’s in production.”