Project Closure

We need to close the project after full scale deployment. Project Manager will organize a kick-off meeting to hand over the project to the F&N management team. A contract will be signed off and the final documentation will be submitted to the owner.

Risk Assessment

1.0 Executive Summary

The report herein discusses the risks of RFID Implementation for the F&N warehouse. The risk analysis identifies the project risks, assesses their probability of occurrence, and evaluates their potential impacts to the project. Various courses of actions are pre-planned to mitigate the risks and assist the management decision making process. The activities with higher risks are listed below and shall be discussed in details in the following sections:

· Hardware Specification & Supplier Selection

· Acceptance Testing

· Selection of ERP Consultant and Middleware

· User Communication and Training

· Process Mapping

In particular, the cost and delivery impact on the risks associated with the acceptance testing and hardware specification & supplier selection will be analyzed in details here.

2.0 Risk Analysis

Activity	Risk Description	Probability (1-5)	Impact (1-5)	Risk Category	Rank (1-10)
1.0 Planning & Rationalizing
1.1 Project Scoping	Not well-aligned, leading to failure at execution	2	3	LP, HI	6
1.2 Budgeting	Over budgeting	3	4	HP, HI	6
1.3 Scheduling	Implementation delays	3	3	HP, HI	7
1.4 Risk Analysis	Overlook Potential Risk	3	3	HP, HI	6
1.5 Steering Committee	Incapable Leadership	3	2	LP, LI	6
2.0 Process Reengineering
2.1 Process Mapping	Overlook important process / procedure	5	5	HP, HI	5
2.2 Process Simulation	Arguable simulation results, results does not reflect actual situations	3	4	HP, HI	6
3.0 Software Integration
3.1 Selection of ERP Consultant and Middleware	Poor intergration	5	5	HP, HI	3
3.2 Redesign of ERP software Code	Bugs in the system	3	5	HP, HI	6
3.3 Data Migration & Documentation	Migration failure and data corruption	4	4	HP, HI	6
3.4 User Communication & Training	Inadequate Training	4	5	HP, HI	4
4.0 Hardware Configuration
4.1 Hardware Specification & Supplier Selection	Compatibility of various hardware with the existing process and software	5	5	HP, HI	1
4.2 Warehouse Layout Modification	Improper modification of warehouse layout	2	3	LP,HI	6
4.3 Hardware Installation & Documentation	Incorrect installation of the hardware	3	4	HP, HI	6
4.4 User Communication & Training	Inadequate Training at ground level	4	5	HP, HI	4
5.0 Pilot Testing
5.1 Acceptance Testing	Design of testing might mislead the Go or No Go decision	4	5	HP, HI	2
5.2 Defect Classification and Correction	Long lead time to troubleshoot	3	4	HP, HI	6
6.0 Full Scale Deployment
6.1 Performance Monitoring (KPI)	Improper KPI	2	3	LP, HI	9
6.2 System Maintenance Plan	Constant hardware.software failure	3	4	HP, HI	9
6.3 Continuous Improvement Plan	Process flows are not review properly.	2	3	LP, HI	10

3.0 Top 5 Issues

No	Activity	Risk Description	Root Cause	Mitigation Strategy
2.1	Process Mapping	Overlook important process / procedure	Many hidden complex process involved	Obtain input from senior/experience members/consultant.
3.1	Selection of ERP Consultant and Middleware	Poor intergration	Loose selection criteria for RFID middleware and consultancy service	Set a stringent vendor selection criteria and only use the vendors/consultants with experience in FCG industry.
3.4	User Communication & Training	Inadequate Training at ground level	Poorly defined training requirements to address individual/functional needs.	Adopt customized training. Set up a hotline/ suggestion box
4.1	Hardware Specification & Supplier Selection	Compatibility of various hardware with the existing process and software	Missing critical hardware features to run the RFID at warehouse.	Consult RFID expert, Establish a comprehensive list of specifications, and source from vendors with proven experience.
4.4	User Communication & Training	Inadequate Training at ground level	Poorly defined training requirements to address individual/functional needs.	Adopt customized training. Set up a hotline/ suggestion box
5.1	Acceptance Testing	Design of testing might mislead the Go or No Go decision	Test checklist is incomprehensive and incomplete	Create a detail test plan, and get expert or consultant to review the testing process and procedure.

4.0 Impact on costs and schedule for top two risks

i.) Risks associated with Hardware specification & Supplier Selection

To ensure the proper selection of the hardware and its specification, a 3^rd party RFID expert is recommended on the contract basis to assist the selection process. It is estimated that the selection should be finalized in 30 days with the help of the RFID expert. A number of well-known RFID consultants like Zebra should be able to provide such ad-hoc service locally. Hence, an additional $5000 should be sufficient. Besides, 10 more days are added to this activity to ensure the correct party is chosen here. The overall schedule will not be affected as we have total 20 days float in this project.

ii.) Risks associated with Acceptance Testing

To ensure the acceptance test is complete, an experienced professional engineer is recommended to help develop the test checklist. It is estimated that the test checklist can be established within 10 days. Institute of Engineers, Singapore usually has a technical committee to provide such consultancy service for Singapore-based companies at a competitive price. Hence, an additional $6000 is deemed sufficient to tap the consultancy service of a professional engineer. The overall schedule will not be affected as we have total 20 days float in this project. The project schedule and budget should be monitored more closely after considering such changes.

5.0 Conclusion

RFID implementation requires thorough evaluation on every aspect, including risk analysis and cost budgeting. The potential risks have been analyzed and each mitigation plan has been proposed in this tutorial. The impacts of the two potential risks have been discussed and the action plans are developed to mitigate these risks.

Budgeting

Budget Allocation and cost deriving is a challenge in this project. It is not easy to get a profoma quotation from vendor because of the pricing is confidential information. Even we pretend we are interested in their product, soon they will find out that we are not keen to buy because they asked a lot of question about company profile and main product, annual Revenue etc which we have limited information on that.

Hence, the costing is derived based on the result from visiting vendor’s website, making phone call & sending email (pretending as buyer), from rfid Journal and also making own assumption on our best knowledge.

The job is shared by all members and I have been assigned to consolidate the result from each member. I like to give a Big thanks to our member, Tzuu Bin, his expertise in doing project for his company help us a lot to understand how the cost likely should be.

Second challenge is ROI (Return on Investment) calculation. After a long discussion, we agreed to perform ROI based on the cost saving has been generated from implementing RFID successfully. We have made some assumption and estimation on the figure as in this part we need some information which F&N does not release due to confidential issue.
Below attached is our result:

Project Schedule

Scheduling is the next critical step of the project as it tells us the overall length of the project and whether we can complete the jobs within the planned duration of 15 months. Estimating the time for the activities is particularly challenging here because we are unable to approach all F&N employee at our convenience for the best guess of the task duration. Duration determination is therefore based on several documented case studies from FMCG industry, RFID reference books, internet resources, and our own experience. A number of assumptions are made in the preparation of the project schedule:

• F&N normal operation time: 8.00am to 5:30pm, 5 working days per week.

• All the planned tasks and activities will start AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

• Project kick-start date is Feb 1, 2011 and latest finish date is May 3, 2012.

• No major change in the company financial health that must postpone the project.

• No labor strike, vendor delay, equipment breakdown, accidents, or major bugs in the software program within the planned date.

• 14 days of Singapore public holiday are taken into account in the schedule.


Exception List:


[Please click for bigger image]

With the stated assumptions above, we decided on the task durations and its predecessors as shown in the Table below:


[Please click for bigger image]

We constructed our Gantt chart in MS Project 2007 based on the planned task durations and predecessor listed in the Table above. Note that the critical path of the project is highlighted in red. We need to pay attentions to the task in critical path as any delay will jeopardize the completion date of this project.

Gantt Chart of the RFID project

We also created the AON diagram in MS Visio to find out the total/free slack of the project activity as well as the early start/finish date and late start/finish date of each tasks. It is found in this exercise that the project has a total slack time of 20 working days. However, this does not mean that we can manage the schedule loosely and let the task slips its planned schedule. We will conduct the risk analysis of the project activities later. Some high-risk activities might need more time for execution. This part will be explained in the later post for risk assessment.

Critical Path of the RFID Project

[Please click for bigger image]