After I left Systems Union in 1991 my first consulting gig was with a former customer: Pepsi Cola International.

Pepsi had drunk the 2-tier, global GL koolaid and wanted to put SunSystems into all their bottling/marketing locations as a global financial system that would report up to their corporate Hyperion consolidation and new 'Business Objects' BI system (manuals still in French).

They even considered buying Systems Union for vertical integration but decided not to as COBOL wasn't cool enough for the global purveyors of 'fizzy water'.

So Florida State accounting wiz 'pencil-dick' Kevin Clement and I flew round the world slamming in SunSystems from Caracas to Cork and Buenos Aires to Budapest. Our initial trip was first class on American to Rio, staying at the Copacabana Palace Hotel and swimming in their pool at lunchtime while enjoying a martini (sshaken not stirred).

The T&E on that trip was more than my consulting fee. Who says accounting is boring?

In those days there was no such expression as 'stakeholder engagement': we came, we implemented SunSystems and we went. It usually took a week or two. Agile and Lean, if they had existed at the time, were for wimps. This was a whirlwind implementation methodology and we usually left the local folks reeling as if they were in one of Moore's tornadoes.

The global GL was a good idea but perhaps our way of executing it left a little to be desired. However you do learn a lot doing implementations this way and we did a dozen or more before we learned that perhaps a little more communication and collaboration and a little less corporate didact was in order.