Hugger Mugger ERP Case Study

HUGGER MUGGER ERP IMPLEMENTATION
Student’s name
Name of the Institute

HUGGER MUGGER ERP IMPLEMENTATION
Executive Summary
The purpose of this report is to discuss the Hugger Mugger ERP case study. Hugger Mugger
produces Yoga accessories like mats, shorts and other things and supplies its product throughout
the world. It decided to implement the open source ERP Compiere and implemented it quickly
ignoring the basic things like testing, training, change management, documentation and GAP
analysis that should be followed in every ERP projects. While companies spent months in
preparation of implementing ERP, this aspect is totally ignored initially. The result was a failure
of the project and change in management. However, new management took several measures,
hired consulting company and finally achieved breakthrough in its ERP implementation. This
was a huge success and dramatically improved certain metrics. This case also talks about what
was missing earlier that lead to failure and many other areas pertaining to its ERP project.

HUGGER MUGGER ERP IMPLEMENTATION
Table of Contents
Executive Summary.......................................................................................................................2
1. About the organization Hugger Mugger and problem or opportunity it faced...............4
2. Nature of enterprise system adopted by Hugger Mugger and its selection and
implementation methodology.......................................................................................................5
3. Difficulties Hugger Mugger have faced in adopting the system, or preparatory steps
for facilitating implementation.....................................................................................................7
4. Assessment of how successful was the adoption of enterprise system and success
metrics that were used...................................................................................................................9
5. Conclusion............................................................................................................................10

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1. Introduction
ERP systems are first generation of systems whose goal is to integrate the data across all the
business departments of an enterprise like Accounts, Marketing, Sales, Supply Chain,
Procurement, production lines etc. They are also configurable based on the business requirement
and still if requirements do not met by configurations, customization is the last option provided
the company is rigid on not changing its business processes.
2. About the organization Hugger Mugger and problem or opportunity it
faced
Hugger Mugger was founded in 1986 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. It was founded by the Sarah
Chambers who was learning yoga by local Iyengar teachers. During those practice sessions,
Sarah draws an inspiration to produce yoga accessories that will facilitate their training sessions.
In the coming weeks, she showed the class about newly made shorts and props suitable for Yoga
and the products were an instant hit in the class. She stared taking orders since then. She also
consulted about her teachers for other yoga related products. Initially she got complains from the
people about the material used for yoga mats. She started using harder mat and this is when
Tapas Mat was born and quite popular even today (https://www.huggermugger.com/).
In 1989, Hugger Mugger moved to a larger place dedicated for the operations and productions as
the company started receiving large number of bulk orders from retailers. During that time, it
was using point solutions to drive its business. It is using Peachtree Software for account related
activities, capturing account payables and receivables, general ledger and also managing the
documentation. For the purpose of providing quotations and booking sales order in the system, it

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was using NetSuite software. It was also using Mail order Manager (M.O.M.) by Dydacomp
vendor for managing its inventory as well as supporting order fulfillment and picking. All the
solutions were quite popular and suitable for its requirement and Peachtree is also acquired by
Sage accounting system. Company was growing at a decent growth rate and as its requirement
was increasing, it was buying the software one after another to cater to its immediate needs that
resulted in multiple incompatible companies. It did not have a far fledge view of installing ERP
systems at the beginning and it is possible that company also don’t have much budget for
installing integrated ERP systems resulting in a multiple systems that cannot talk to each other.
However, it soon realized that M.O.M. is not doing good job of handling inventory and
managing inventory. Besides bug in the products, the functionalities it offer is quite limited.
NetSuite also fell short of expectations soon as the organizati5on is seeing high inflow of orders
and generation of large operational data. When it became $ 5 million Company, it soon realized
that the existing systems were not capable of handling the future business growth of the company
and that is when it started looking for the mid-tier ERP vendor. As the company’s revenue is 5
million only, ERP vendors like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle do not make much sense as their
license and installing cost is quite high and can be affordable only by the large corporations.
The realization of the problem of managing 3 incompatible systems is actually the opportunity
for the organization to revamp its IT systems and replace all the 3 legacy systems with powerful
ERP system that will provide integrated process view and supports the business growth.
3. Nature of enterprise system adopted by Hugger Mugger and its
selection and implementation methodology

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Hugger Mugger adopted the mid-tier ERP called Compiere. This ERP is open source ERP that
comes with no warranty and support however it support can be taken by its vendor Aptean on a
contract basis. It is available freely and company just had to look for the software partners or
consulting partners for implementing this product at their premises. It is using Linux operating
system and oracle 10g as a database (Compiere.com, 2018). The unique proposition of this ERP
is that it is open source and can be implemented at a fraction of cost than other ERP systems.
Apart from providing integrated suite of modules like Accounting, Order Management,
Inventory Management, Human resource, it also has a modern view of role based dashboard
systems and functionality assignment (Bajaj, & Ojha, 2016). This means that system allows to
define various roles like material manager, procurement manager, quality manager so that they
can view and make changes only in the functions required by them. This provide the
authorisation feature as only authorized users can access particular business function. Apart from
this, it is highly configurable and also provide the ability to customize without programming.
Compiere is the only product in the market that provide the customization feature without
programming as claimed by its vendor Aptean (Aptean, 2018).
The selection process was quite straightforward as the company is looking for the ERP suite with
rich functionality in its budget and there are not many vendors. SAP R/3 and Oracle are quite
expensive products. As the requirements of the company is basic in nature and business
processes are also standard based on their business model, they are not performed as-is and To-
be Analysis and simply selected the product (Kulkarni, et al., 2015).
As far as implementation strategy is concerned, Hugger Mugger installed the ERP and
implemented it in a very short period of time without any consulting partner. Current IT staff
were not comfortable with the way ERP works and they treat ERP systems like any other point

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software and installed it and start using right away without actually realizing the potential of the
product as well the readiness of the end users (Ram, Corkindale & Wu, 2015). While most of the
companies spent considerable effort in their implementation projects and focuses on
documentation, Hugger Mugger totally ignored the documentation. It also conducted training but
it was like a very high level overview session that do not help the users to actually understand
how they will be using the system for conducting their day to day activities. IT staff did very
small amount of testing perhaps they were not having the adequate time for the extensive testing.
Real life scenarios and processes and data flow were not properly tested and system was put to
production environment without any readiness. This was the integrated suite and data flow from
1 department to another however if the quality of data is not good, it will create issues for
everyone in the company. During data migration, data quality was not improved and there was
redundant data, corrupt data in the system (Sun, Ni, & Lam, 2015). Implementation was a big
disaster as the company realized that the business processes have become more complicated now
and the same process now requires much large effort and time.
The main reason of the failure of ERP implementation project at Hugger Mugger was that there
is no consulting partner chosen to guide the company about the nature of ERP projects and huge
risk of implementing them (Jagoda, & Samaranayake, 207). All the basic things that are required
to make the project success like planning, testing, and change management were ignored.
Further, most of the IT staff members also left the company leaving it in a very bad shape.

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4. Difficulties Hugger Mugger have faced in adopting the system, or
preparatory steps for facilitating implementation.
There were no preparatory steps that were taken by Hugger Mugger to facilitate the
implementation. It quickly selected the ERP Compiere and started implementing the product.
This can happen due to ignorance of IT team about the complexity of ERP projects and they treat
it like any other point system east to use and install. Apart from this, Compiere was the open
source ERP and not very popular (Stafford, 2005). Most of the case studies about the failure of
ERP implementation were largely deals with the SAP and Oracle ERP. When the system went
live, it created confusion and chaotic situation all around in the company. Processes were set up
by the IT team without consulting the business team. As a result, business process becomes quite
complex after the implementation and users find it difficult to work. For instance, order booking
was made so complicated that users has to enter the data on 8 screens moving 1 after another and
now the process takes 10 minutes to complete which earlier used to takes 2 minutes. It totally
ignored the data clean-up activities and the dashboards and various reports generated by the new
ERP is not having the corrected data and users are blaming the product however product
functions on data (Kramer, et al., 2016). Thus, there is ignorance in staff about the ERP projects
and their responsibility. During the same time, most of the IT staff members left the company
and Chamberlain joined as a president. He quickly surveyed the situation and realized that it is
difficult to work with EPR in such a botched implementation project and decided to continue
with the legacy systems and also started revamping the IT systems.
He hired Knowledge Blue which is a consulting company and partner of Compiere and also
implemented the same ERP for large number of customers. This company created the structured
methodology, project plan, key plans and focuses on the testing, training and change

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management. It also focusses on including the full time business team at least some of the
members for the implementation. Some of the main changes it did is prepared a business flow
diagram for all the business processes. It also realizes that several processes includes sharing of
data to downstream players like FedEx for customer shipping address details and thus built a
custom ERP where the address will automatically be picked by the FedEx team from the
Compiere systems. It also reduced the unnecessary fields on various screen to make it clear and
user friendly for the company. Finally, the system went live again but this time it used phased
approach. Order entry go live first and it has really ease the job for the business users by
unleashing the power of EPR if it is properly installed. As per Chamberlain, Company is booking
orders in the afternoon and shipping them in next morning which is achieved by real time data
sharing between warehouse fulfilment team and order entry. Gradually, all the functions are
moved to Compiere and also data was cleaned and as a result, reports and dashboards were
largely reflecting accurate and the business users were really pleases and accepted the new
system.
Compiere had a unique feature of providing customization without programming. As per the
Hugger Mugger’s management, if any changes are needed in the product, one can do it
themselves however in case of SAP and Oracle, you have to go to the vendor and pay every time
for changes.
5. Assessment of how successful was the adoption of enterprise system and
success metrics that were used
The adoption of the enterprise system was very difficult initially because the company went live
without spending much efforts after buying the product. They just installed the system and

HUGGER MUGGER ERP IMPLEMENTATION
started using it which complicated the standard business processes leading to huge dissatisfaction
among the business users. However, till now, company had not made any major investments.
The product is an open source that comes for free and it did not hire any consulting partner also.
But after the implementation, the negative results were quite evident. Most of the employees
from existing IT team have left the company after goofing up the implementation process and
that is when Chamberlain joined as a president. He analyzed the situation and also hired
consulting company Knowledge Blue that was having good experience in implementing the
same product for large number of customers. New company has defined the proper
methodologies, business flows and focuses on the other things to make the ERP implementation
as a success and yes, it was a success after it went live again.
Company had quickly realised and also appreciated the flexibility of the Compiere’s open source
software. One of the metric used by the company to evaluate the effectiveness of this project is
the turnaround time between order booking and order shipping. It realized the noticeable
differences in the improvement. With the help of Compiere systems, company is shipping all the
orders received before the afternoon on the same day and orders after afternoon on next day
morning. This was a significant improvement that improved on time delivery of the orders.
6. Conclusion
Hugger Mugger was founded in 1986 in US. It manufactures yoga related accessories. Initially,
company was growing slowly and purchased point systems whenever there is a need. It results in
3 different legacy incompatible systems. Also, Company begun to see higher growth and also
realized that its legacy system will not support the future growth and thus switched to open
source Compiere ERP that replaced all the legacy systems. The implementation was a botched

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implementation first time due to lack of any consulting partner however company soon rectified
its mistake and hired a consulting company that have experience in implementing the Compiere
product for several companies. This time the implementation was successful. Apart from this, it
was well accepted by the end users and company metrics started improving dramatically in
stabilization phase itself.

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References
Aptean. (2018). Aptean ERP Solutions - Compiere ERP. [online] Available at:
http://www.aptean.com/products/compiere-erp [Accessed 23 May 2018].
Bajaj, S., & Ojha, S. (2016, March). Comparative analysis of open source ERP softwares for
small and medium enterprises. In Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom),
2016 3rd International Conference on (pp. 1047-1050). IEEE.
Compiere.com. (2018). Compiere Open Source ERP - A Modern, Low-cost ERP Software
Solution. [online] Available at: http://www.compiere.com/ [Accessed 23 May 2018].
https://www.huggermugger.com/
Jagoda, K., & Samaranayake, P. (2017). An integrated framework for ERP system
implementation. International Journal of Accounting & Information Management, 25(1), 91-109.
Kramer, F., Rehn, T., Schneider, M., & Turowski, K. (2016). ERP-adoption within SME—
challenging the existing body of knowledge with a recent case. In Multidimensional Views on
Enterprise Information Systems (pp. 41-54). Springer, Cham.
Kulkarni, A., Hegde, N., Sharma, M., Kulkarni, A. A., Hegde, N., & Sharma, M. (2015).
Educational ERP systems in the market–a comparative study. International Journal of Innovative
Research Science in Technology, 1.
Ram, J., Corkindale, D., & Wu, M. L. (2015). Examining the role of organizational readiness in
ERP project delivery. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 55(2), 29-39.

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Stafford, J. (2005). Hugger-Mugger fixes goofed open source ERP implementation. [online]
SearchDataCenter. Available at: https://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/1103531/Hugger-
Mugger-fixes-goofed-open-source-ERP-implementation [Accessed 23 May 2018].
Sun, H., Ni, W., & Lam, R. (2015). A step-by-step performance assessment and improvement
method for ERP implementation: Action case studies in Chinese companies. Computers in
Industry, 68, 40-52.