A Fjord, a Go-Live and a Team Across Three Continents

There are more elegant places for a project meeting than a hotel in Stavanger on a rainy May evening. But there are few more logical ones. Our head of development, Andreas Löffel, lives and works in Asia, the HELITS team is based in the Berchtesgadener Land, and the client in question manufactures in Bad Reichenhall. When three points lie that far apart, you meet where the travel routes cross. This time that was Norway.

The occasion was not a workshop or a strategy offsite, but a concrete milestone: the go-live of Lyrion ERP at Ludwig System GmbH & Co. KG, a manufacturer of radio-controlled load hooks and lifting equipment for forestry, construction and logistics. A go-live is the moment an ERP project stops being a project and starts being the system a company runs its orders on the next morning. That transition is exactly what we discussed in Stavanger.

Why You Meet in Person for a Go-Live

We work in a distributed way, and it works. Code reviews, cut-over plans, data reconciliations — all of it runs through Git, Microsoft Teams and shared documents, regardless of whether someone sits in Anger, in Bad Reichenhall, or eight time zones further east. Day-to-day work needs no shared office.

A go-live is still different. It is the point where the last open questions are no longer tickets but decisions with consequences: which legacy data gets frozen at the cut-over date and which keeps running? Which posting areas go live in the first wave, which in the second? What happens if an interface jams on the first productive day — do we roll back or fix forward? Such questions get resolved faster and more honestly at a table than in a thread where every answer waits twelve hours for the next time zone.

Andreas owns the development side of our Lyrion rollouts — the interfaces, the data migration, the client-specific adaptations. The fact that he travels in from Asia for this go-live is not coincidence but method: you do not plan the critical 48 hours around the cut-over from a distance.

What Was on the Table at Ludwig System

Ludwig System is a textbook mid-sized company in the sense we mean the term: a highly specialised manufacturer with a real product, grown processes, and an IT landscape that has formed layer by layer over the years. Anyone building radio-controlled load hooks for forestry and crane operations — products like the LudwigHook or the LudwigChoker — has bills of materials, variants and production orders that do not fit into a spreadsheet.

That was precisely the reason for the switch to Lyrion. In Stavanger it was no longer about whether, but about the mechanics of the changeover: the order of the modules, the cleanliness of the article and supplier data, the verification of the first production orders in the live system. We walked through the cut-over plan line by line and moved several items — because the most honest plan is the one that reflects the reality of the operation, not the wish of the project team.

As with every rollout, the technical risk is manageable; the organisational risk is the actual work. That is why the question of who carries responsibility and decides on the client side at the cut-over date ranked higher on the agenda than any configuration detail. Anyone familiar with our experience from earlier Lyrion projects knows why: beyond the IT consulting itself, it is the internal project ownership at the client that decides between success and delay.

The Fjord as Part of the Work

On the second day we left the hotel and went out onto the Lysefjord — that 42-kilometre arm of water southeast of Stavanger, above which the Preikestolen rises 604 metres straight up. Two hours on the water, mobile signal mostly gone, waterfalls coming straight out of the rock face, and a silence no conference room can produce.

This was not a reward or a box to tick. It was the continuation of the meeting by other means. The toughest knots in a cut-over plan rarely loosen under pressure at the whiteboard; they loosen the moment nobody is staring at a screen any more. More about the order of the data migration was decided on the fjord than the evening before in the hotel. We had already seen this after CARDEXPO in Graz, when the detour into the Lurgrotte produced better conversations than the trade show itself: a break is not the opposite of work, it is one of its more productive forms.

What Remains

Back in Bavaria the go-live is now ahead of us, and the essentials are prepared: a cut-over walked through end to end, clear responsibilities, an agreed plan for the first productive days. Whether a project lands cleanly is not decided on the cut-over date but in the weeks before — and in whether a team works together even when it is spread across three continents.

For us, Stavanger was the proof that both are possible: working distributed and still meeting in person at the right moments. The fjord was the bonus. That in the end a Bavarian manufacturer in Bad Reichenhall goes live on a new ERP system is what counts. More on our approach to software development and ERP rollouts can be found on the respective pages.

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