Edgewater Technology’s experience in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation, consulting and training has called to light six critical observations organizations should consider when formulating an implementation strategy.
- The Right Core: Selecting the Right Team is Crucial
- Creating Buy-In: Get Everyone Enthused
- Setting the Target: Know Your End Goal
- The Proving Ground: Know it Works Before You Go Live
- Right Sizing: Pace Yourself
- Common Pitfalls: Things to Watch Out For
The Right Core:
When involving the entire enterprise, choosing the right core team is a key component for any successful project. One could compare the leaders of the team to the General Manager and Coaching staff of a major sports team. The team collectively knows their company’s culture, mission, business objectives, operating procedures, as well as corporate financial policies. The team should be composed of a mix of business and technical resources.
The most successful core teams are those who first learn the features and options of the software they plan to implement. They know what information they need to improve the business and where in the process to collect it. Once these items are known, they can design their game plan.
As the plans come together the individual functional areas of the enterprise must form sub-groups. Each subcommittee or sub-group should have champions that can be relied on to be the team’s captain and co-captain.
Creating Buy-In:
Challenge one is always managing change and people’s concerns. Even though implementation is serious business, the more successful project managers foster positive motivation by putting a sociable spin on the project when promoting the concept to the organization. Projects with creative names and themes fare much better at capturing and holding people’s attention. Sports themes create a good team atmosphere and seem to be a common factor among the success stories. Along with the positive attitude, the successful teams are those where everyone in the enterprise—not just the core team—understand the purpose, the benefits and the objectives of the project. The failure to communicate the purpose and benefits to the enterprise often means the project itself may fail.
Setting the Target:
Success comes after knowing and understanding the objectives and the requirements of the project at hand. Project teams must have a clear vision of the purpose and business objectives in order to move forward and hit their targets. When objectives can be tied to a solution and requirements mapped to functionality in the software tools, the teams are successful. They can properly size and scope the tasks and assign them to the appropriate resources. Target dates are set and met by understanding the requirements, what resources are needed, the availability of resources, and the constraints in the chain of events. Projects fail miserably when tasks within a project are arbitrarily assigned or target dates are subjectively chosen.
The Proving Ground:
Every successful implementation is preceded by a team who has executed an intensive pilot program. The pilot database is a simulated company set up - usually in a place called the “war room” - where the team can test their design scenarios. By replicating the company’s workflows, data, procedures and policies, the teams can go to work. They can use the pilot to prove or redesign things like naming conventions, conversion tables, business rules, user access, forms and reports just to mention a few. The pilot is the place where the success stories can come together.
The teams that fail are the ones who think the scripted user acceptance test or the end-user training sessions take the place of a good pilot. Implementation teams that don’t pilot always experience significant delays, or have to cut back on the scope. In some worst case scenarios, users are working in a live production environment that it is incomplete and doesn’t meet the objective. Poor planning and inadequate testing always caused major frustration in the user community and dampens any positive momentum.
Right Sizing:
The phasing in of a new system’s functionality provides a much smoother way to integrate new features and procedures into the workplace and allows a controlled way to manage the change. Most ERP packages have stand-alone modularized functionality and lend themselves to starting up with the core functions of general ledger and inventory control. After the core functions are implemented phasing in the peripheral functions in operational and financial pairs such as accounts payable and purchasing or sales order entry and accounts receivable become easier. By focusing on the functionality with the highest organizational priorities first, the team keeps its positive focus.
The “all at once” approach most often results in a lose-lose situation. The psychological hurdle of “sink or swim” always has a negative impact on the team’s attitude and can make managing the change very difficult.
Two Common Pitfalls:
The two tasks most often underestimated in ERP implementations are data conversion and naming conventions:
Data Conversion: More times then not data conversion can be a major bottleneck. A lot of time can be spent converting tables that could have been keyed in, in half the time. Not understanding the function of the data entities also exhausts a lot of time, by causing conversion programs that have to be restructured and rerun. Successful conversions are correctly mapped out and should be thoroughly tested by the team.
Naming Conventions: All ERP packages come with the flexibility to assign class or category codes to entities such as items, customers, and vendors. Also transactions such as order entry and inventory movements can be assigned transaction type codes. Learning and understanding the relationship between these entities and categories is essential in creating meaningful data, reports, and queries. More often than not, teams can spend longer than they originally estimated to understanding naming conventions and class codes.
TO WRAP IT UP:
YOU NEED A WIN-WIN
Technology can help you meet your company’s objectives but the most valuable resources in any project are the people. Make them feel that way. Give them meaningful objectives. Give them the means (a proving ground) to demonstrate they met those objectives. When the employees feel like they have won, the company wins.