“It is a disappointing reality that a majority of ERP implementation falls well short of true project potential. Buyers of ERP, not implementers, need to firmly own business process planning.”
Rob Clark,
College of Business,
Stony Brook University
Preparing for ERP Implementation
A vast majority of ERP implementations are held back by numerous obstacles—some seen and some unseen. The results are overly costly and stressful implementations that fall well short of the true business potential of the ERP project.
In ERP projects in which an appropriate software was selected, the largest obstacle to top-level success is unprepared buyers of ERP. To be more specific, buyers who:
- Do not aggressively lead the implementation project
- Do not fully own the business process planning and design activities—and effectively turn this over to implementers
We have observed this preparedness problem persists for a couple of key reasons. First, because buyers of ERP rarely understand how to comprehensively prepare and manage ERP project risks—especially executives who must lead complex multi-department project activity. Secondly, during the sales process, ERP software vendors and implementers rarely talk about the hard work the buyer should conduct or the many potential ERP implementation problems. Often, they are not aware or they think this heavy ERP risk topic will hurt odds to make the sale.
Because of this odd dynamic in the ERP market, implementers and ERP implementation approaches are set up to get customers up and running but not to seek excellence. It should be noted that some implementers could do more, but they don’t as they believe their customers could not handle more. Other implementers simply could not do more—and this is not surprising in a market that does not often demand excellence.
Our solution
The following chart shows a top-level view of our approach to fully prepare for implementing enterprise software. More specifically to help companies:
- Properly own the business process planning—including a single and highly organized reservoir for all project planning data.
- Develop a plan considering modern business software’s tools for configuration, workflow, and business intelligence.
- Develop an enterprise-wide business process plan; vice a more silo based plan.
- Control complexity and competing interests.
- Use implementers as expert in the new application and adjust components of their normal approach that attempt to develop business processes.
For details of these major steps
The Valuable Results
- Control and lower implementation costs
- More functions implemented – and faster
- Improved coordination between all implementation participants
- Lower stress on your team
The type of readiness that results from this planning is not easily achieved with normal implementation methods. This process should start 3 to 9 months before implementation and does not replace implementers and normal implementation duties.
Flexible Service Delivery Options
- Process steps can be trained and performed by your team or our facilitators.
- Services are configurable to build upon your work and support business software projects at any stage.
This service offering is about tightly controlling ERP implementations which is critical to controlling overall ERP project risks and in turn achieving ERP project excellence.