What do you do if your ERP system needs to integrate new technology?

Assess compatibility: Evaluate how the new technology aligns with your existing ERP system in terms of compatibility, integration capabilities, and potential impact on workflows and processes. Plan and test thoroughly: Develop a comprehensive integration plan, including testing protocols and contingency measures, to ensure a smooth transition and minimize disruptions to your ERP system and business operations.

I would complement the provided point by emphasizing the importance of future-proofing and scalability. While assessing current business needs is crucial, it's equally important to consider potential future requirements. The integrated solution should be flexible and adaptable to accommodate evolving business processes, new technologies, and changing market demands.

Integration requires integrated planning. This would involve identifying / working with cross functional stakeholders, getting an end to end view of business need and the integration solution. Following are some of the critical aspects to be considered during planning: stakeholders approvals to the solution, number of integrated lower environments required, resource availability for iterative data population and testing, training needs, alignment / flexibility of release schedule between applications and integration, post go live support, ongoing cost for maintenance of integration layer. Engaging the right guardrails of the organization ( Privacy, Cyber Security teams, etc) during planning will ensure successful deployment.

The problem of integrating new technologies will eventually be introduced to the ERP project as an additional work package if the ERP system has been selected correctly at the beginning of the project. As technology advances, such types of situations are typical. If you have the appropriate team, a compatible ERP system, and the integration has been assessed thoroughly in the project assumptions, it can be executed successfully.

I would also emphasize the importance of creating a comprehensive testing strategy that covers various scenarios and edge cases. Testing should not be limited to functional aspects but should also encompass non-functional requirements such as security, performance, and scalability. Moreover, involving end-users and key stakeholders in the testing process is crucial. Their feedback can help identify potential usability issues, workflow bottlenecks, or deviations from business requirements. Finally, establishing a robust regression testing plan to ensure that existing functionalities and integrations are not adversely impacted by the new technology integration. This will help maintain system stability and prevent unintended consequences.

Here’s the skinny: in most ERP implementation projects I’ve been involved with, the reason for the change to another ERP system was ambiguous at best. Most, if not all sighted wanting better reporting as the reason when pressed. If your ERP system is capturing all data points you need from your transactional data, then the ERP is doing its job and there should be zero reason to change it. Reporting is a completely separate function that ERP systems have been asked to do. The gardener is also the chef situation. Best to develop a reporting data model that sits on top of your ERP and automate the reporting process. ERP implementations are not cheap. Save your cash.

Unfortunately "Enterprise Architecture" (EA) is something that is rarely discussed and even less considered and taken into account during such "transformational" project as an ERP implementation. EA is like urban planning and before implementing an ERP (or any other tech for that matter), the future needs to be looked into and carefully plan. Only then can you make informed decisions and answer questions like; would we benefit from implementing an iPaaS to "decouple" our systems and make our technology stack more flexible? Technology's rate of change is only increasing and flexibility is the key. If you don't look ahead and plan carefully, you'll have to "scrap" and redo a lot of stuff.