The Implementation Was Already in Trouble. It Went Live Anyway.

Material Management IFS Cloud Recovery and Go-Live A U.S. defense shipbuilder

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The Situation

A U.S. defense shipbuilder delivering to Navy programs runs several ship programs at once, each at a different stage of the build cycle. Engineering decisions on one hull become material demand on another while a third is being outfitted.

Material has to move through the entire chain for that to work. Engineering demand, procurement, receiving, reservation, staging, internal distribution, production, project accounting, financial control. Every physical move also has to land accurately in the records, or the yard is running on paperwork nobody trusts.

The shipyard was already implementing IFS Cloud, deployed on-premises, as the system meant to hold all of it together. Then serious implementation problems emerged. Inherited configuration and process decisions needed correcting, critical workflows were unfinished, and the platform was not doing the job it had been bought to do.

They brought Tsunami in to recover it.

The Approach

Joining a program already in motion makes diagnosis the first job. Tsunami started by working out what the yard's people actually needed the system to do, assessing the decisions already baked in, and finding the gaps keeping the platform from working as intended.

The shipyard went live on IFS Cloud. That was the recovery milestone and it did not finish the job. Tsunami stayed on afterward, correcting implementation errors, stabilizing critical processes, stripping modifications that had added complexity and cost performance, and moving processes back onto standard functionality wherever standard functionality was enough.

Material management became the deep work. Eight solutions, each designed against the whole business process behind it rather than the ticket in front of it, and each tested before handover.

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The other four run the same way. A kiosk workflow replaced the paper requisition form that had been operating outside the system entirely. Storage zones and direct putaway now route received, manufactured, and returned material to the right location and raise the transport task to get it there. Engineering intent, carried in bills of material, drawings, CAD and product lifecycle data, and controlled design changes, connects directly into work-order planning and material demand. And inventory allocation now reaches project cost, invoicing, and customer billing at the correct point, because a material transaction that is right in the warehouse and wrong in the ledger is not finished.

Every one of the eight was tested before it went live, against fifteen categories of exception as well as the standard path. Insufficient stock, multiple bins and warehouses, quantity changes, unplanned material, consolidated receiving, cancellation and rollback, shortages, missing setup data. The exceptions are where a shipyard actually lives.

In Depth: For Technical Evaluators

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The Results

The numbers are not in this story yet. Cost, processing time, inventory accuracy, productivity, and reconciliation effort are all being measured, and none of them is cleared for publication. When they are, they belong here.

What can be said now:

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The Relationship

Tsunami did not leave at go-live. The work since has been course correction: removing inherited modifications that cost performance, returning processes to standard where standard is enough, and bringing functions still running on legacy applications into the same environment as everyone else.

That last part is the slow one. Retiring an old application is easy. Determining whether standard functionality genuinely covers the requirement, and getting the affected team ready to work differently without disrupting the yard, is the actual job.

The current work moves closer to the deck plate: getting material from staging into the hands of the craftspeople who need it, and making the physical movement match the record. Discovery and design are complete and phase two is in development. Those results get reported when the work is in production and there is enough data to judge it.

One Thing Worth Saying Out Loud

A consultancy makes money building custom software. What we took off this program is that most of what a shipyard wants built has already been bought.

Naval shipbuilding does present requirements that genuinely need targeted development, and we build it when they do. The rest is a performance problem, a maintainability problem, and an upgrade problem waiting to happen. Knowing which is which is the job, and it is worth more to a client than the billable hours it costs us.

Client quote pending.

Is Your Implementation Already in Trouble?