57 sites. 100% of revenue at risk. Zero margin for error.
Konnect ANZ
How a trans-national distributor with 57 locations and 100% of its revenue running through a single ageing legacy system made the move to D365 without losing a cent.
Industry
Trade Distribution, Distribution and logistics
Organisation Size
57 locations across Aus & NZ
Initiative
ERP Implementation, End to End Delivery
Services
End-to-end change management, Resistance management, Stakeholder engagement, Train-the-trainer
Scope
100% of the organisation
Platforms
D365
Key Result
100% of revenue protected through go-live; zero headcount loss, no customer or supplier impact
"This project would not cost anyone their job. For long-tenured staff who had operated the same way for years, that assurance needed to be felt on the floor".
Konnect had been running on Oracle for longer than most of its staff could remember. By the time the decision was made to do something about it, the current version was 12 releases ahead. A gap that size is not a mere update, it's a new system in every practical sense, and one that shows up regularly in many organisations.
When a decision is made to defer a system upgrade, even for good reasons, the workarounds become load-bearing. Spreadsheets handle calculations the system can't; someone then re-enters the results manually; bolt-ons patch gaps that proper functionality would have closed. It works, until it doesn't, and the risk of staying put outweighs the risk of moving.
Like most businesses, and in the case of Konnect, that tipping point was the looming risk of an unsupported system, physical servers in Perth with no redundancy, and infrastructure that had simply been outpaced by the business depending on it.
The final decision was to move to D365. But after nine months in design, the project wasn't progressing.
That's when GoodShift Co. came in.
The Challenge
The technical risks on this project were visible and being managed. The people risks though, were harder to see, and in many ways much more significant.
Konnect generated 100% of its own revenue through this system and sat inside a publicly listed parent company as a significant contributor to group performance. Approximately 200 people in 57 locations across Australia & New Zealand would need to change how they worked. If the system went live and people couldn't or wouldn't use it as designed, the downstream effects would be felt well beyond the project budget. Customers, suppliers, and shareholders would all be exposed.
The commitment had also been made explicitly to staff: this project would not cost anyone their job. The technology was changing the tools, not the roles. For long-tenured staff who had operated the same way for years, that assurance needed to be felt on the floor, not just communicated from above. Scepticism was real. If it hardened into resistance at go-live, adoption would fail regardless of how well the system itself performed.
This is where a deliberately scoped and executed change management program earned its place. GoodShift Co. came in with a structured plan to address exactly these risks: an independent program of work with its own scope, its own engagement activities, and its own measures of success. The goal was to make go-live the least risky moment in the project, because the change work that preceded it had been done properly.
How We Worked
GoodShift Co. audited the existing change function, identified the gaps, replanned, and lifted the profile of change management within the project. The team operated as the translation layer between people on the floor and the technical delivery group; an independent read on readiness that an SI, by structural position, are rarely able to provide.
Every engagement threshold was set higher than standard. The UAT pass rate target was 90%, against an industry benchmark of 70–80%. The condition attached was specific: no critical process could sit in the remaining 10%. Anything that touched core operations must pass. The go-live was staggered by region, with the highest-volume region going last, so each wave could stabilise before the next moved across. A parallel Oracle environment stayed live throughout the transition as a deliberate fallback.
Training was built from scratch: face-to-face and online, designed around how people actually worked in branch environments. Town halls ran on GoodShift Co.'s recommendation. Customer-facing staff wore L-plates during the transition period; a visible, low-stakes signal that gave customers context and took pressure off staff learning in real time. On-site hypercare reps at every branch meant the team was on the floor when it mattered most.
Throughout deployment, organisations around the world had taken a far more cautious approach to workplace illness, , and Konnect were not different. This careful position resulted in periodic team absences and ongoing changes to onsite access. While these factors required adjustments to delivery, the extension to the program was primarily driven by the time needed to resolve complex data migration and security/permissions issues. The project ultimately ran approximately five to six months beyond the original schedule. Throughout, the priority remained the same: getting it right mattered more than simply meeting the original delivery date.
The Result
Konnect went live across all regions. Customer impacts were avoided almost entirely. Supply chain continued without a hitch. No headcount loss.
The risks that were most visible at the start of the project, those related to the technology, were managed through the technical delivery. The risks that were harder to see, those attached to people, were managed through the change program. Both had to succeed for the project to succeed.
If your project carries this kind of exposure, let's talk before the Shift hits the fan.
Drop Katy a line
This case study reflects qualitative outcomes as reported by project stakeholders. Specific commercial data has been withheld due to client confidentiality.
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