656 Part IV • The Information Management System
The communication infrastructure was an ongoing
frustration during the initial phase of implementation. Juan
Carlos Gracia, the project IT leader, noted:
One of the challenges from an IT perspective that we
faced was in terms of dealing with six different tele-
phone companies when setting our wide-area network
for centralizing the operations of MaxFli. That is some-
thing that you really have to take into consideration.
Even though we are a cluster, we speak the same lan-
guage, we have many things in common, even the same
religion. But legally, there are many differences between
countries.... So [each] has to be treated differently.
Telecoms are privatized in most countries [but are] pub-
licly managed in Costa Rica and Honduras. [And] that’s
where we have most of our operations concentrated.A second technical constraint was the challenge of
finding a vendor able to support the Jornada handheld
across the six cluster countries. The MaxFli project team
faced a choice: find a vendor who could provide a service-
level agreement to provide and maintain the handhelds
locally in all six countries, or find a vendor in one country
who could coordinate shipping the handhelds throughout
Central America and perform all the maintenance from
one country. They chose the first option and signed a serv-
ice-level agreement with a vendor to provide all of the
Jornada handhelds plus an additional 10 percent standing
inventory to use as backups to all six countries and provide
a 14-day repair/replace service locally in each country.
The Project Team in Central America
Similar to the Colombian team, the MaxFli implementa-
tion team in Central America was led by an experienced
trade marketing manager. Walter Kruger had worked his
way up through the BAT trade-marketing function in
Central America. Unlike BAT Colombia, BATCA did not
share many business practices with Chiletabacos, nor did it
have strong relational ties with them.
One of the difficulties for the BATCA project team
was a lack of training in MaxFli. Gracia remembers that the
“flying doctors,” a term he used to refer to the MaxFli
support team, dogmatically insisted that no one on the
implementation team needed MaxFli training. Instead, they
suggested that reviewing the MaxFli documentation and
system outputs were enough to prepare the implementation
team. The “MaxFli University”–style training used by BAT
Colombia, where several key project personnel spent time in
Chile studying MaxFli, was not offered to BATCA. This
was especially problematic to Gracia, who had built his IT
career outside of BAT and joined BATCA at the beginning
of the MaxFli project to provide expert assistance during
this large system implementation. With no history within
BAT, he felt at a disadvantage in learning the details of the
MaxFli system. Gracia laments:Marco [a colleague IT manager] told me, “oh, you
must go to Chile for two months where you’ll be
trained in MaxFli. How it has been done, how the
implementation works, what are the interfaces andHonduras
GuatemalaEl Salvador
NicaraguaCosta RicaPanama256k384k256k1024k256kLEGEND
k = kilobits per secondEXHIBIT 7 The Intercountry Communications Backbone for MaxFli in Central America