Exclusive: 'One DuPont' IT upgrade frozen amid review
After three years, and just two months before debut
Just two months before the mammoth IT and financial-reporting overhaul was scheduled to start going online, "we will defer work on our 'One DuPont' program, and will assess steps for future completion," confirmed DuPont Co. spokesman Dan Turner, after I asked about reports I'd collected from DuPont and Accenture employees that the company had stopped work on the three-year-old program and that 300 IT contract workers had been taken off the job.
"DuPont continues to take actions to reduce our cost structure to compete more effectively in 2016," and the company is still committed to "capture the value" One DuPont was designed to create, Turner added. No comment on how many managers and DuPont staff are affected or cost savings from the move.
The decision comes three weeks after Tyco chairman Edward D. Breen was named interim CEO of DuPont, replacing Ellen Kullman, who quit abruptly on the eve of another disappointing profit report. Breen has also merged two DuPont business units in a bid to streamline the company, ordered reviews of capital spending and research, and confirmed that "everyone is talking to everyone" among pesticide-company CEOs, as investment bankers spread stories that DuPont is preparing to merge its ag chemical operations with those of Dow, Syngenta, FMC or other rivals.
Makes sense that DuPont is halting IT structural upgrades -- if key divisions the system is supposed to integrate might not be part of the company very much longer, as a person familiar with the decision told me.
Kullman described One DuPont in her July earnings call this way: "Over the last three years we have undertaken a program that we call One DuPont, and it basically changes the fundamental transactional backbond of the company into a simplified, standardized to SAP standards, not to DuPont standards, and moving to standard costs, common chartered accounts, the whole thing, across our globe.
"That wil start to stand up in January and roll over the world over the next two years, as we convert these systems. And that is going to enable us to automtically, instead of using a proprietary consolidation and reporting system -- which we now have, GCAP -- it's going to allow us to use a standrd one that will automatically create the schedules, the spreasheets we need to understand the business very quickly.... There's going to be great efficiences there. It's going to impact our financial organization."
