And the Big day... Go-live

I stayed last night in the hotel court yard. Naveen asked Jenna and myself to stay back in the hotel as it was too late in the night. slept around 1 AM and woke up around 6 AM. In the office by 7:30 AM. Anxiously waiting for business users to arrive. People started coming in. By 8:30 AM most of the users were in.

Customer service started taking calls by 9.00 AM. users were so nervous. calls took much longer than the usual. we are (Deloitte team) all over the place. Helping CS, Sales, pricing, shipping , operations etc. Dave brought the pricing issue to my notice. It took me a while to debug the issue and found that the issue is due to date parameters at database level.

Oracle sales guy was also there. He bought pizza for lunch. we didn't have time to eat Pizza . finished lunch in 5-10 minutes. Things became crazier post lunch. 3-5 PM is busy for customer service. Call wait time was 10 minutes at one point . Abandoned calls were increased.

Not many shipping ssues(we realized later that we overshipped 120k worth of products) and we were able to ship like any other day. we had team meeting of 6 -10 PM discussing over issues and action plan for concurrent jobs torun in the night etc etc. Had Pizza again for dinner and went home around 11:30 PM.

While driving back home from Twinsburg to middleburg heights in GMC-Terrain car on I-80 at the speed of 80 mph, I got the time to recollect what happened over last couple of days. It was sense of satisfaction that we made it. The fact that we were able to import orders from Web, EDI without any pricing and freight issues and able to ship 100% on day1 is big achievement . I felt so happy. It was my project, It was my design and it was so satisfying to see users clicking on the forms designed by me.

No one in the project team know that It is my first project where I handled from the begining to end.

Go-live : Day 0

I got a call from Naveen around 6.15 am saying Open so conversion is running slow. I talked to Anant as well. Reasons for slow ness is not known. I told Anant to not to kill open SO.

Got ready and went to office. Every one from Deloitte and MIS in the office by then. Meeting started by Dan. Everyone was busy eating bagels. We started smoke testing by 9:30 and had some issues with SOA. Ran AR receipts conversion and gather stats. Went to Burger king for lunch with Karuna and Rahul.

Jeff, Ameya and Bhupesh came around 2 PM . Jeff was there for 30 mins and left. We were preparing for smoke testing at 4 PM. Everyone from business came and started smoke testing around 4:30 PM. Order interface from web, EDI and EP was good, had some issues with pick release . Pawan made quick fixes to make it through. We realized that we can't ship as the CMS calendar is not open for sunday. They took lot of time to ship manually .

Worked with customer service to resolve some of their issues. Also, fixed credit card issues with Bobby ,Karuna and Jenna. fixed all open so issues. Disabled all the inactive ship methods and completed other cut over activities.

Overall great day . Left around 11:30 PM and went to stay in the hotel Fair field inn.

Go-live : Day -1

29- Jan -2010: Saturday : Reached office by 8:30 AM. Had conf call about the status, so far everything is on track (All Friday night every one from client team worked for closing legacy system and data extraction). We are supposed to start loading into Oracle at 10.00 AM. We got all the files by 9.00 AM. Rahul started validating customer price lists with the help of Anant ,we found some duplicates. Asked Steve / Elaine to fix the duplicates and re-extract the data . They gave another file at 11.00 AM. meanwhile we validated other files customers, sites, relationships , on hand etc.

Naveen brought Lunch from Chiptole. Jenna, Karuna and Bobby were also there. Jenna and Karuna were helping Kevin to enter new items.

We again found duplicates in customer price lists. Steve / Elaine working on that . It's 12:30 PM but they haven't figure out about the duplicates. I proposed to start loading customers and deal with the fall outs later, to save time. Everyone agreed.

We started loading customers at 1 PM ,it finished fairly quickly at 2 PM. We have the new file of cusotmer price lists by 2 PM. We loaded that and followed by On hand . It was 5 PM by the time we finished Customer price lists, customers and on hand. We almost catched up the lost time.

We fixed the fall outs from all the above conversions and closed sales orders started around 6 and finished by 8 PM. Had dinner from Pad Thai (Duck joke) and I started Data collection in net refresh and EP sales refresh program. Everything finished by 9:30 PM. Karuna fixing Vendor contract errors and was waiting on that to finish before starting open sales orders. Meanwhile Rahul loaded open purchase orders and me, Rahul and Jenna worked on fixing open SO errors. we made lot of changes to data to make it work.

Around 11 PM , Karuna found some issues with Vendor contracts and she was in discussion with Kalyani to fix those. I was waiting for those to be fixed. Around 11:30 Naveen, Bobby and Jenna left home . Rahul left around mid night. I was still waiting on Karuna. I started to load some vendor contracts with Karuna to expedite the process. At latst around 1 AM we started open sales orders and I drove back home and went to bed at 2 AM.

I was excited and it was a great day.