ACN

This Mutli-level Marketing (MLM) company has been expanding rapidly worldwide with operations in 24 countries, selling everything from internet, cable and mobile phone services, to healthcare, nutritional and beauty products. Based on Concord, NC, ACN is privately owned with sales of approximately $500 million per year.

The engagement with ACN was as Technical Program Management of their most ambitious launch effort to date: Japan. Management saw the need to start standardizing their systems across all international platforms – something they had not done to date. Currently, each instance globally uses different e-Commerce, back-end database, CRM, and infrastructure systems. Japan would be the beginning of new e-Commerce  (Hybris), CRM (Salesforce.com), and Inventory (Peoplesoft Inventory) systems that would be documented and eventually standardized worldwide. The Program Management challenge here was merging the different development efforts into one complete and actionable plan: Hybris was being developed by a third party vendor utilizing full Agile methodologies, while all other systems (including a home-grown comp/bonus MLM platform) were done in a more traditional waterfall development lifecycle.