It may not be textbook, but it's working so far...

so, i've recently completed a project which has been working quite well for our company... i'm not sure it can be considered textbook management and implementation of a project, but it seems to be working so far... any advice on how i could have done things differently/better, or what i should be looking out for in the weeks to come would be appreciated... i call it "enhancing the export order management process at company xx"

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As the Manager for Production Planning and Delivery Execution for a company involved in offshore export, I was recently assigned the task of improving the Export Order Management Process at my company. Like many other companies, our company has over the years narrowed our business focus to our core competencies, and as such, outsource our export logistics to a broker, who manages our export shipments. This means that activities such as booking vessel space for containers, negotiating freight rates and managing relationships with carriers are handled by the broker.
The main challenge with this seemingly straight-forward business process was that our company runs SAP, while our small broker outfit operates on a simple query database within which all key order information is stored. With our broker having better access to real time information, the order management process used to rely on manual query downloads into a spreadsheet generated by one of the broker’s employees throughout the week, from which our company’s export order management and delivery execution was carried out.
The biggest issue with executing on “snapshot” query downloads was that the moment the query was downloaded into a spreadsheet, the data was outdated. That is, because the order management was affected by many variables such as changes in the ship’s schedule, production upsets, and customer changes, there was a need for “real time” data for both our employees and the broker to work off of.
The project was simple in concept: map the current process, identify data inputs (both source and people), determine critical data and who should be inputting the data into a “real time” environment. The real time environ from our perspective needed to be SAP, as this was our single “truth”, and we needed the broker and all other relevant parties to work off of SAP.
When the preceding was completed, I worked closely with an IT Business Architect, who took my business needs, worked with the end users to design the solution, and then went to work with IT Technical for the technical programming.
After 4 weeks of designing and programming, we moved on to a week of testing to create all possible scenarios imaginable and the solution passed the test. Our company now has all key export order management and delivery execution data in SAP, and SAP can at the clock of a button generate real time reports for all key personnel involved in export order management.