What are the key steps and milestones in an ERP implementation project plan?

This will come as a surprise to some but the discovery phase is one of the most overlooked, yet most important phases of a new S/4HANA Cloud implementation which is the why planning and the execution is so important. You will need to understand your current business process, technology, data and people in order to understand the pathway to the new world and the desired end state. The purpose of the Discovery phase is to discover the solution capabilities, understand the business value and benefits of the solution to the customer’s business, determine the adoption strategy and roadmap in alignment with understanding the solution capabilities and the SAP product roadmap

An ideal ERP should be truly enterprise wide, including external stakeholders like vendors and customers, statutory-compliance entities; integrative, to facilitate agile adaption, and early realisation of positive impact on the way the enterprise works.

In my experience, the first decision from senior leaders is the relationship between current process and the target ERP system process. If senior leaders are not willing to adopt and drive change, then they project will fail. Special attention should be paid for any process that circumvents planning under the guise of being responsive to customers. There are many ways to do both.

Make sure you capture proper scope and objectives and realise the benefits of complete alignment with proper use cases and then execute validation mechanism

Key challenges here are: what is the degree of customization required? Should the users end up doing lots of 'work around'? If customization | work around are going to be costly and time consuming, option for bespoke ERP should also be considered. Ultimately, cost of owning/renting an ideal ERP, both capital and recurring, vs expected benefits should be carefully weighed.

Make sure to evaluate vendor and their expertise and competencies and then evaluate the proper vendor section procedure with the adaptability of existing infrastructure

Today’s ERP projects employ an agile and iterative testing process during the design and build phase including multiple CRP’s, Integration testing and final User Acceptance testing. The project should not proceed beyond this phase until all critical defects have been remediated and retested.

Taking time to map in detail every single business process. Then challenge each step to be sure they are still necessary and not just habits.

Picking a strong internal team of process owners, and clarifying roles, responsibilities, and expectations - this is crucial, in my experience. If you have the wrong people in the room the project will be at risk of delays, rework, bad decisions etc.

Make sure you properly analyse the design and then configurations . Do proper process validations and then do the adherence to standards making you are optimising the systems

I consider this part of ERP deployment the most crucial and challenging. It is in the wholehearted acceptance and usage of ERP by the internal end-users lies the true success of ERP, and therefore the realisation of enterprise's goals [increase in productivity, profitability].

End users adopt what leaders and managers support. Accountability must lie with senior leaders. The investment in time for proper training must be included in the project cost. It is also much better when supervisors and users are made aware of the change and the benefits of the change long before they are scheduled for training.

I suggest greater emphasis on Data Migration. Migration of high quality data is an essential step that frequently gets overlooked in the excitement of implementing a new system. The integrity of data deteriorates over time and there should be no home for poor data in your shiny new system. Cleanse aggressively and transform remaining data to include only correctly defined data attributes. Deploy an effective process of Data Governance with accountability and authority assigned to Data owners. Where data is concerned, be brave, and start again.

This is the part that always gets left out. Everyone is so relieved that the initial implementation is over that follow-ups get ignored. They should include: 1. An end to end audit with each user--is the system working as designed? 2. Are the metrics being met? 3. Are refreshes and backups working as planned? 4. Are the workflows and APIs working as designed? 5. What opportunities are there for further improvement? (Hint: There are ALWAYS opportunities). Is it time to flow chart the new processes again and find inefficiencies?

Make sure you are regularly monitoring the performance and addressing the gaps . Optimise the matrix and make sure effectiveness is address by the systems

An ERP implementation is also an opportunity to rethink legacy processes and remove redundancies. Fitting the ERP with the existing process design may not be the best solution. There may be an opportunity to leverage standard capabilities that the ERP offers. This will keep customisation at a minimum and will help contain present and future costs of customisation

ERP systems as they are evolved and used today go beyond just 'Planning' [the third word in the phrase ERP]. A good ERP should encompass, and be capable of integrating, almost all possible processes [current, re-engineered, and new] of an enterprise facilitating backward and forward integration, as the enterprise grows. It should also ensure data safety, security, confidentiality, compliance, automate as many processes as possible, bringing in overall better management of all management functions like planning, organising, staffing, resources (land, labour, capital, machines and so on] [identification to deployment], and meeting the concerns of owner-stakeholders.

For startups lacking established processes, it's advisable to align organizational workflows with ERP processes. This approach typically reduces both time and customization expenses.