The evolution of an Eclipse conversion:

When an organization undergoes a conversion to Eclipse, they proceed through various stages following the conversion. Each company typically stops at one of these levels:

• Survival
• Discovery
• Recovery
• Stability
• Efficiency

Survival: This is the first stage, and everyone’s energy is focused on getting the most basic tasks done. Purchase the material, get it to the customers, pay the bills and do whatever needs to be done to make it happen, whether the computer is cooperating or not.

For example:

• Overriding the inventory if necessary to get an order for a customer, or

• Creating a duplicate pay–to vendor if necessary to get a check for a vendor payment, or

• Creating a duplicate sales order if the computer doesn’t print the first one, or

• Grabbing the material off the transfer or vendor truck for the customer, and never receiving the transfer or purchase document.

• Etc, etc, etc

Employees are not even aware of the errors they are causing in the computer, because the immediate problem is fixed;

i.e.; the customer got the order or the vendor got the check. 

The time pressure is so great to complete the basic daily tasks that errors not related to the basic tasks go unnoticed or ignored, quietly accumulating in a pile. These errors though, have a significant impact on future operations.

Discovery: This is the second stage, and everyone is getting used to the system and starting to feel more comfortable with the basic day-to-day details of their interaction with the computer system. In this stage people now start to have the time to notice that the computer is not handling some functions in the way that they expected.

For example:

Why won’t the computer order a product for my branch before I run out?

• Upon investigating, you find that there are purchase orders (po) and inter-branch transfers (xfer) that were never received (in the survival stage), and the projected inventory level in the computer is not correct. The same unreceived po is causing the vendor invoice not to be paid in accounts payable.

Why is the vendor complaining that they never got paid, but I know we mailed the check?

• You paid the wrong vendor.

Why does this vendor have two pay-to accounts? 

• You created a duplicate when you were in a hurry 2 months ago.

Etc, etc, etc

You start to discover the errors you created in the survival stage.

Recovery: In this stage you are even more comfortable with your day-to-day functions, and the list of errors created in the survival stage has been identified for you.  Two things need to happen:

• The errors need to be corrected, but not before....
• You get the training to prevent those errors from being repeated.

Stability: Congratulations: You are back to zero. In this stage, when everyone is very comfortable with his or her daily function, they have corrected the pile of errors that accumulated in the beginning, and they know what to monitor to prevent the accumulation of any future errors. The daily tasks have become fairly routine.

Efficiency: You understand the basics.  But some companies want to be more efficient than their competitors, so they may want to measure how well they are doing the basics.   Now you want to use the system to monitor how well you are actually performing. You might use metrics, or have other measurements by which you can measure how productive you are. You may want to have custom reports to for sales, purchasing, pricing, receiving, etc .  Every client is unique, but they all have one thing in common: they want to be more productive.