Strensall Merchants - Onboarding Plan

Strensall Merchants is a builders' merchants group with branches across the North of England and the Midlands. The reason for buying Enterprise is simple: branch, trade-credit and key-account teams should see each trade account's orders, deliveries, calls and credit position together, instead of reconciling them by hand.

Goals

• A clean first refresh that lands before anyone is asked to judge the data.
• Branch, trade-credit and key-account teams asking real questions about trade accounts within the first weeks of use.
• A customer administrator who can add sources, manage users and read the refresh status without calling us.
• A setup note handed over at the end, so nothing lives only in my head.

Roles and owners

Phases

Phase one: access and readiness (before kickoff)

What I need from your side is everything in writing before we begin. Connector credentials arriving after the kickoff is the single most common reason a first refresh slips, so we close this phase first.

• Confirm the Snowflake account, the role BG-Demo will use and the warehouse to be used.
• Provide written access for each source system in scope: the CRM, the call recorder, the mailboxes, the helpdesk, the accounting system and the order and delivery data.
• Name the owner of each source who can answer field questions.
• Confirm the executive sponsor and the customer administrator.
• Agree the security review support we will provide, and who at Strensall Merchants receives it.

Gate: written access in hand for every source in scope. If one source is missing, we start with the others and keep the missing one on the open points list.

Phase two: kickoff

• Walk through this plan, the owners and the gates.
• Agree what "a good first week of data" looks like for each team.
• Confirm which branches and teams see which data, so permissions are designed before data lands.
• Agree the order in which sources are connected.

Gate: owners confirmed and the connection order agreed.

Phase three: connect and map

Before we switch on the refresh, each connector is configured and each field is mapped and checked against a sample from the source owner. I do not describe a mapping as fine until I have checked it against real records.

• Connect sources one at a time, in the agreed order.
• Map trade account identifiers across the order, delivery, call, email, ticket and credit sources, so one trade account is one record wherever it appears.
• Record every mapping decision in the setup note as we go.
• Flag any source whose record counts look flat or odd, and agree with the source owner whether it is a data issue or a change on their side.

That maps cleanly only when the account identifiers agree between credit control and the sales systems, so expect a conversation with those owners.

Gate: each mapped source reviewed and signed off by its owner.

Phase four: first refresh

• Run the first full refresh and review the results with the source owners.
• Check record counts against what each owner expects.
• Confirm the nightly refresh completes before the working day starts on business days, as for every tier.
• Fix and re-run anything that does not reconcile before users are invited.

Gate: source owners agree the data looks right, and the nightly refresh has completed cleanly on consecutive business days.

Phase five: access, identity and first users

• Set up single sign-on and automated user provisioning with the identity administrator.
• Invite a small group of early users from the branch, trade-credit and key-account teams.
• Run short working sessions where those users ask their own questions of their own trade accounts.
• Collect what they could not find, and decide whether it is a mapping gap, a missing source or a how-to.

Gate: early users are asking questions without help from us.

Phase six: roll-out and handover

• Widen access across teams in stages, so support requests stay manageable.
• Train the customer administrator on adding users, reading refresh status and raising a request.
• Hand over the setup note: sources, credentials process, mapping decisions, known quirks and open points.
• Introduce Daniel Okafor as the ongoing contact for adoption and reviews, and agree the first review.

Gate: the customer administrator has run each routine task once, with me watching.

Service levels during and after onboarding

The Enterprise service levels apply from the start of the contract: the Enterprise availability level, the Enterprise priority one first response time and the nightly refresh deadline. Service credits on Enterprise cover both availability and data freshness. Any change agreed in the order form takes precedence over the standard terms, and Lewis Kerr holds the commercial detail.

Risks and how we handle them

Open points

• Executive sponsor to be named by Strensall Merchants.
• Confirmation of which source systems are in the first wave.
• A second customer administrator, to avoid a single point of dependence.

Communication

I will send a short written update after each gate, listing what was done, what is next and what I need from your side. Escalations go to Lewis Kerr. Questions about adoption and reviews go to Daniel Okafor.

Thanks, Callie