Global eyes were on the project. The pressure to jump first, look later was intense.
Our client—a Sales Director at a major frozen foods company—had one rule: No configuration until we understood the problem.
Senior sponsors kept asking: “When does the build start?”
His response: “When we know what we’re building.”
He’d lived through a failed TPM rollout before. Watched the team rush to set up, build what the vendor recommended. Eighteen months later, Finance was still running shadow spreadsheets.
So this time, he told us to keep our hands off the technology.
Instead, we spent 10 weeks mapping $180M in trade spend through four category teams. Not how it should flow—how it actually flowed.
Most implementations hear “TPM project” and start ticking boxes.
We heard, “Maybe we should figure out what’s broken first.”
Turns out, sales and finance had 14 different opinions about who approved what. Full-blown conflicts.
Plot twist: Those 10 weeks became the blueprint for everything. Test scripts. Training materials. Change planning.
The result? 87% adoption at launch. Forecast accuracy up 23% in 90 days.
The system went live on time because we built workflows that matched how the team actually worked—not some textbook process map.
The lesson? Slow down to speed up. Those 10 weeks saved us 6 months of “why isn’t anyone using this?” meetings.
Anyone can buy TPM software. Not everyone gets their people to use it.
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If you are struggling with TPM user adoption, contact me at www.cleargoal.com.au