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An immaculate upgrade within 24 hours

“Every morning I go to work with a smile”

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“I wanted to do more than just work on projects, I wanted to build up something in a business myself. Moreover, Philips gave me the opportunity to work at national as well as international level.” Sytze Jan Geertsma (35) is program manager BIF (Best In Finance) at Philips DAP (Domestic Appliances and Personal Care). The added fact that DAP is located in Drachten was also pretty important to Sytze Jan: “I really did want to live in the north of the country”.
‘Best In Finance’ is the program used to bring a single, consistent line into the entire financial management in all our product divisions. In particular, Sytze Jan works with SAP’s Business Warehouse and Strategic Enterprise Management components. ”These are two modules that are run on top of SAP R3. Pretty complicated since we’re talking about new functionality and because various product divisions are involved.” Here too, the entire process harmonization effort is aimed at enabling the Philips organization to operate more effectively. Sytze Jan: “We’re now well on our way to getting all the organizations into the same system. Later, that will also enable us to introduce new functionalities much more easily.”

Five years at Philips: four different jobs
Before Sytze Jan joined Philips in 2001, he worked as a SAP consultant with Price Waterhouse Coopers. In the course of his five years at Philips, this is already his fourth job: following consultancy work and being project leader during implementations in Germany and Italy and later team leader Sales Applications, he has now taken on a very demanding role as coordinator. When asked for a typical success story, the first that sprang to mind was the tale of the implementation of SAP Enterprise in 2004, in which he was involved as project leader.
”Upgrades never really come at a convenient moment, because you basically can’t do anything else during the time you’re carrying out the upgrade. In this case we were very keen to get on with a number of projects – and we actually succeeded in doing so. We fine-tuned the various projects in such a way that there were very few bottlenecks. And after Go Live we had everything back on the rails very quickly. By definition, an upgrade is always cross-functional, so all functionalities in the system have to be tested and have to continue to work well together. That means that cooperation is of crucial importance. This was a joint effort involving the various functional as well as technical teams here in the Competence Center and everything went really well. I was truly delighted.”

A one-off event
Inevitably there’s a lot of suspense involved in an upgrade. “There are about four months of preparatory work involved, but the actual implementation in the operational environment is very much a one-off event – one that you really can’t test. Obviously you’ve done all you can and there are back-up scenarios in place, but this is the moment that it all comes together… the moment that something could happen that you’d never, ever expected. But this time everything went well. And we succeeded in carrying out the entire upgrade in just 24 hours – on a Sunday. On Monday morning everything was back on the move!”

Sytze Jan doesn’t miss his former dynamic life as an external consultant. “I feel really at home with Philips. What I value most in our way of working are the short lines of communication, having all the necessary expertise within easy reach, both functionally and technically, and the fact that, in everything, standards are very high. We have a lot of real quality at our disposal. The atmosphere is great, we have very few misunderstandings so, yes… I honestly do go to work with a smile every morning.”

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