"VOGSY is one of the most involved and helpful teams I've ever worked with in my career."
— Trevor Crane, Senior Product Manager, Productive Edge
How Productive Edge implemented VOGSY in five weeks — without a single client noticing
Productive Edge is a global consulting firm operating across the US, Europe, and South America. They replaced their ERP system across all regions and shut the incumbent down a month early. The transition did not interrupt projects, timesheets, or client delivery.
Trevor Crane, Senior Product Manager, led the implementation. Many thought completing this in six months would be impossible. It took five.
TRUSTED BY
5 weeks
Evaluation, testing, and decision
5 weeks
Implementation, rollout, and go-live
5 months total
From research start to replacing Kantata — one month ahead of deadline
Zero
Clients who knew the transition was happening
What every leader worries about when changing ERP
Switching ERP while the business is running means every active project, every timesheet, every invoice depends on the system you are replacing.
The questions are always the same:
Will delivery be disrupted?
Will the team resist it?
Will it take months of internal resources to manage?
Will the vendor be there when things get complicated?
At a glance:
| Implementation KPI | The result |
|---|---|
| Decision speed | 5 weeks from first contact to decision |
| Rollout speed | 5 weeks from setup to go-live |
| Business disruption | No impact on projects, timesheets, or clients |
| Setup effort | Core tasks handled by a team of two |
| Internal resistance | Team leads confirmed no additional workload before go-live |
| One year later | System in active use across the organisation |
How Productive Edge avoided risk and gained speed
Test before you commit
Five weeks were spent in a trial environment, configuring the actual operating model of the business:
Company and department structure
Regional setup across the US, Europe, and South America
Currencies and local compliance rules
Country-specific time-off policies
Project workflows and activity structures
When that configuration was right, it carried directly into production. No rework. No redesign. No starting over.
"When we decided we had it just right, we could simply flip the switch." — Trevor Crane
The implementation is modular, not monolithic
The implementation is structured to be manageable rather than daunting.
The setup assistant broke the work into modular tasks across resourcing, project setup, accounting, and CRM integration — each with a progress bar and a time estimate.
Tasks expected to take weeks were completed in an afternoon by a team of two, without constant vendor involvement.
"We didn't need long sessions with VOGSY to do this setup. We could monitor the progress of the implementation as a whole without major handholding." — Trevor Crane
"At the end of the day, our ERP transition to VOGSY was about as painless as it can possibly be."
— Trevor Crane, Senior Product Manager, Productive Edge
No disruption, no resistance
Before go-live, Productive Edge validated the system with every stakeholder group — operations leads with complex use cases, HR, finance, and team leads across the business.
When they flipped the switch, there was no disruption at all. The measure of a successful implementation is that business continues.
Timesheets continued.
Projects continued.
Client delivery continued.
Kantata was shut off ahead of schedule
"There wasn't a ton of fanfare and that was actually a good thing." — Trevor Crane
Seamless inflight transfer for all functions
In-flight projects were transferred with hours, costs, expenses, revenue, and percentage completion fully intact using the Opening Balances tool.
Closed historical projects were stored separately, keeping the new system clean and the migration straightforward.
Every function onboarded simultaneously. HR, finance, and sales worked in parallel — not waiting on each other:
Country-specific policies
Accounting setup
CRM integration with HubSpot
No dependencies. No bottlenecks
Working with VOGSY
Productive Edge had complex use cases — multiple countries, different local regulations, and a European operations lead with requirements that went beyond standard configuration. VOGSY provided direct access to technical experts, worked with P/E on specific scenarios, trial learnings, and migration decisions.
"The involvement was substantive. It did not create dependency — we retained full autonomy. But when the hard questions came, the answers came with them". — Trevor Crane
Ready to run your global project business with clarity and control?
Whether you're expanding across borders or streamlining operations, VOGSY gives you the visibility, speed, and confidence to scale profitably, without replacing your local finance tools.
In their own words: a Q&A wiht Trevor Crean.
How did you manage the risk of switching ERP while the business was running?
We moved into a sandbox environment and really started getting hands-on experience with the tool. We could configure everything, test it properly, and when we decided we had it just right, we could simply flip the switch and transition our development environment over to our onboarding. So we didn't need to redo any of that.
What was the impact on the team at go-live?
When we finally flipped the switch, we started logging our time, projects, resources, and time off in this new system. There wasn't any fanfare — and that was actually a good thing. We had done so much prep work, and we were so ready for this transition that we didn't even need our overlap with our incumbent. We shut it off a month early.
How did you handle active projects during the migration?
There was a tool in the back office called Opening Balances. This allowed us to set up the container structure for projects, and even though we already had hours or percent completion done, we could bulk upload those, and it would update the front end to reflect all of the progress, hours, costs, expenses, and sales we had made up to that point.
How did you manage internal stakeholders?
We had our head of operations in Europe, who had quite a few challenging use cases. We had partners in HR and accounting who we needed to make sure could complete their jobs without us making it harder for them. And then we had our leadership — we convinced our various team leads that this would not add any extra work for them, and in fact that it was worth making the switch and learning a new tool.
What was it like working with the VOGSY team?
We were very impressed by the level of access we had to technical experts who could answer some of our harder questions. VOGSY was very cooperative — we set up several hour-long technical discussions about how we might do things. It's one of the most involved and helpful teams I've ever worked with in my career.
Would you do it again?
Absolutely. We were able to complete what many thought would be impossible in six months. In five months, we met our deadlines. The team likes it. The tool is heavily used now, a year on, and we're extremely pleased with our decision.