Background: The need for transformation
Litehouse had been operating on a technology landscape that had supported the company for over 25 years, but was no longer able to meet the needs of a fast-growing food and beverage business. Their legacy systems lacked the scalability and modern capabilities needed to support multi-site operations and cross-functional processes. As Taylor Martin explained, the organisation wanted “systems that would grow with us… sustainable and modernised to support best practices for the food and beverage industry”.
The company launched an extensive selection process, ultimately choosing Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage as its new ERP platform and Columbus as its system integrator partner. While technology was a central part of the initiative, Litehouse quickly realised that redesigning processes and preparing people for change would be equally critical.
A first for Litehouse: Introducing OCM
Before this project, Litehouse had no formal OCM function. The concept itself was unfamiliar to leadership, and Taylor’s OCM role “didn’t exist” prior to the initiative. Columbus played a key role in educating leaders on the importance of OCM, helping them understand why it was essential not only for the implementation but for the future of the business.
Over time, OCM became deeply valued across the organisation. As Taylor shared, Litehouse’s leaders came to view OCM as “probably 51% important and then 49% is the systems” because of the impact on the company’s 1,200 employees.
The OCM approach: listening, planning, and prioritising
The OCM journey began with a series of envisioning workshops, four-hour deep-dive sessions with key functional groups including supply chain, sales and marketing, and finance. Using digital tools such as Klaxoon, Litehouse and Columbus facilitated exercises to identify pain points, process challenges, improvement opportunities, and future-state needs.
The workshops generated more than 300 OCM-related tasks, ranging from process redesign to risk mitigation. These were consolidated and imported into JIRA, the project management tool used throughout the journey, where Litehouse assigned change owners and prioritized initiatives based on complexity and importance. Playback sessions reinforced alignment by presenting findings back to functional teams and senior leadership, ensuring transparency and shared ownership.
This structured approach helped Litehouse create a robust change impact log that identified what was changing, who it affected, and the level of impact across roles, processes, and systems. It also captured ownership and mitigation actions, and ultimately fed into communications, training plans, and role-specific support.
Sharpening change focus with change journey navigator
As the scale and complexity of the transformation became clear, Columbus partnered with Applied Change to introduce the Change Journey Navigator (CJN), providing Litehouse with a structured way to sharpen its focus on the human side of change. With multiple functions, stakeholder groups, and competing priorities in play, CJN helped the team move beyond plans and task tracking to better understand how people were actually experiencing the transformation.
Working closely with Litehouse leaders, Columbus used CJN insights to surface critical human dynamics that are often harder to see through traditional OCM artefacts alone — including levels of emotional commitment, belief in the change, confidence in what was being asked of people, and the friction they were encountering in day-to-day work. This added perspective complemented Litehouse’s well-established OCM activity management by revealing where engagement was strong, where momentum was at risk, and where additional leadership attention would have the greatest impact.
By combining structured OCM delivery with a clearer view of the lived experience of change, Litehouse and Columbus were able to adjust focus, messaging, and support in a more targeted and timely way. This helped leaders sustain engagement, strengthen confidence, and maintain momentum as the programme evolved, ensuring that change efforts remained grounded in how people were really feeling on the ground, not just how the plan was progressing.
Embedding OCM into the project structure
As the programme progressed, Litehouse began integrating OCM activities into JIRA project sprints to ensure change efforts stayed connected to system development and testing. This shift helped reinforce OCM as a core part of the programme rather than an adjacent workstream. As Taylor explained, “Everyone understands and appreciates how important OCM is for a successful implementation, it’s just a matter of finding the time alongside system testing and build activities that are equally critical.”
Columbus consultants partnered closely with functional BPOs, ensuring that each business area had both Litehouse and Columbus expertise driving change readiness. When resourcing or collaboration challenges arose, Columbus acted quickly to adjust roles and ensure the right fit, an approach that Taylor praised as essential to keeping teams aligned and productive.
Building a culture of engagement and transparency
A major OCM objective was shifting Litehouse’s culture toward greater transparency, communication, and shared ownership. Early surveys revealed that employees wanted more visibility into project progress and a central place for information. In response, Litehouse launched three major communication channels:
- A monthly project newsletter that gives voice to team members, celebrates wins, and shares progress updates, key system features, and the current project status and phase—highlighting where they are today, what’s next, and what the company can expect.
- A centralized company and project team intranet site with key project links, org charts, team photos, communications, recognition updates, an FAQ, glossary, and project documentation.
- Regular recognition initiatives from small rewards and “little wins” programs to monthly lunches and open houses that build community and support—along with virtual and onsite kudo boards, a monthly excellence recognition program, and other appreciation efforts.
These efforts were extremely well received by both internal employees and external consultants. Team members began actively asking for more updates and community-building activities, as they were seen as highly impactful and helped reinforce a strong teamwork mentality.
Strengthening team connection and resilience
Recognising that major transformations can create significant stress and pressure for key stakeholders, Litehouse invested in team cohesion and wellbeing. They introduced team-building exercises, DISC personality assessments, and Crucial Influence courses to help the team stay unified and prepared to lead the change. Team cohesion was also established early through strong project branding, including the widely embraced “Project Caterpillar” theme, which represents the organization’s transformation journey—much like a caterpillar evolving into a butterfly. The team adopted key terminology aligned to the theme and created a vision statement that is prominently displayed throughout the workspace and valued each day in the office.
These elements helped sustain morale throughout every phase of the project, especially during the core “Construct” phase.. As Taylor noted, “The little things really do matter at this point, especially with less than a year until go-live.”
The Columbus partnership
Both Taylor and Hailey highlighted the strength of the partnership with Columbus. Litehouse valued Columbus’s relationship-driven approach, cultural alignment, willingness to adjust resourcing when needed, and ability to guide the organisation through unfamiliar change practices. Litehouse described Columbus as a collaborative partner deeply committed to their success.
