he same NIBCO team that selected the ERP software vendor was responsible for selecting an implementation partner. It was critical that this third-party consulting firm support NIBCO’s decision to take a Big Bang approach, which was viewed as high risk.
I remember serious counsel where people came back and said: ‘What you’ve described cannot be done. And here are all the failures that describe why it can’t be done.’ We just kept looking at them and said: ‘Then we’ll get somebody else to tell us how it can be done.’
Scott Beutler, Project Co-Lead, Business Process
 
After considering several consulting firms, IBM and Cap Gemini were chosen as finalists due to different strengths: NIBCO was already an IBM shop from a hardware standpoint, but Cap Gemini had a superior change management program. The team elected to employ IBM. By contracting for a large number of services (implementation consulting, change management consulting, technical consulting and infrastructure), NIBCO's management hoped it would have enough leverage to get a quick response when problems arose.
Not all of the potential IBM project leaders that the team interviewed believed in the viability of the Big Bang approach.


When we hired IBM, we hired them with the agreement that they were going to help us to do a Big Bang in the timeframe we wanted. As far as I know, IBM had not done a successful Big Bang up to that point. In fact, [Michael] Hammer1 got on the bandwagon about halfway through our project and preached that Big Bangs are death.
Jim Davis, Project Co-Lead, Change Management