Paving the way for ERP implementation: What businesses need to know
Before a company can implement an ERP program, it needs to ensure that the organization is prepared, and various aspects need to be considered and that is what we will do in this article.
Some considerations are the following:
Company readiness:
First step is for the business owners to examine the organization to determine if they can find suitable process owners (if this was not already done as part of the decision process) and other project members. This is where you need to think about how to fill the gaps. It is essential that project members have enough time for the project and many of the key resources will have to be freed from regular tasks.
It is also important to consider the company's organizational structure to assess their readiness and ability to change their current practices. If the organization does not perceive the benefits (at business-, technical- or operational level), it is hard to achieve a successful implementation. Does the company have the right resources for the future?
Standardization strategy:
The program should also follow clear rules that align with the company's IT strategy on how to use IT components and whether software changes are permitted. If changes are needed, there should be a preferred method for doing them. These are only the initial project rules, and the topic will be covered more thoroughly during implementation.
Determine up-time requirements:
A key input to the program is to determine the “Up-time” needs and the consequences of system downtime. We will recommend calculating costs in the various business areas if the system is not operational. In this process it is essential to identify the most vital processes. This input will help in choosing components and designing test strategy.
What is “good enough”?
The company needs to think about how to balance functionality and implementation time. Should the company launch with a basic solution, or does it need to have everything ready before launching? There are pros and cons to both approaches which we will discuss in a future article.
How to run the project
To a high degree the success of an ERP program depends on having the right people involved in the project and ensuring the internal support in the organization. In my experience it is crucial that control of the program is not left with the implementation partner, but instead that internal people occupy important roles to ensure that the knowledge acquired during a program remains within the company after the project is over.
We realize that people need a lot of assistance to take on key program roles and therefore it could be considered to make agreements with consultants who can work on projects as part of the internal team and at the same time function as a coach for the internal resources.
Organization.
To succeed with a program, it is essential to establish the appropriate organization, which includes both the internal team and the external team. We value having the proper resources on a project more than choosing one partner that oversees delivering the entire program.
It should be the client owning the program organization, which should contain all the deliverables. In our 25 experience it is not effective to split the responsibility for different deliverables between the partner and the customer. It represents a major risk to have a contract where the partner is responsible for a specific number of deliverables, as that hinders a “one team” collaboration.
A suggestion to how a program organization per business area could look like:
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Although we have included some areas related to the different roles, it is important to work as one team, where the team is accountable for delivering.
We have experienced programs where the business had to deliver test cases/automated test, documentation, and security roles. That kind of deliverables can be challenging for the business, as the business users are skilled at operating the business and not necessarily good at this kind of deliverables.
For the general ERP implementation, the end-to-end process should be considered, which means that team members with different process knowledge and consultants with different product expertise are needed.
For the Dynamics 365 specific area, it is important to have competent consultants and solution architects who can help in choosing the right tools and technology. ERP should not be used to solve everything, but products such as Power platform and BI should be considered to ensure that the appropriate tools are selected for the various tasks.
To set up the teams, it is essential to have members with diverse skills to handle all aspects as well as specialists. It is smart to do a skills- and resource mapping to ensure that team members are concentrating on their strengths and preferences, as that will boost productivity both long and short term.
Manage the project.
We are clearly in favor of sprint approach for implementations (we intentionally do not write agile approach, as it could be confused with the Agile methodology), but if the team do not work as one team is it difficult to success. Team members must share the responsibility for delivering and it must be avoided that the project is delayed, because one team member has not completed some tasks. The team must see all tasks as shared responsibility and support each other to complete all tasks.
It should not be allowed to postpone part of the deliverable in connection with implementing a process, but the team should continue to focus on the remaining deliverables before new are started. A process area should be ready to go-live before continuing to the next process area. If allowing postponing areas, it creates a significant risk that the difficult areas are postponed.
It is important that team members are available in a sprint, and the project should avoid having resources partly allocated - unless they are subject matter experts, that should give input to the project (both business users and product specialists). It must be up to the sprint planning to make sure that the right resources are allocated at the right time. We do not expect that the process owner/SMB’s should be allocated 100% to a sprint, but the business & process owners should be available on short notice to give critical decision input.
The one team approach is different from many of the typical agreements with partners, in which there is often a clear divide between what the partner will deliver and what the client delivers. This type of agreement is typically made to make it possible for the partner to price the delivered services, but it is not necessarily supporting the best collaboration and outcome.
We know that it can be difficult to price the project, when the business team and partner is responsible for shared deliverables, but we are sure that the cost will be reduced, when team members are primarily focusing on what they are good at instead of focusing on if the customer or partner is responsible for a specific delivery. A suggestion could be to set the budget, based on the number of external consultants and the required time. If processes are not delivered according to plan, the scope must be reduced, or the budget increased.
Selecting the right tools.
Before starting a program, it is essential to determine which tools are needed, and this is not a “one-size-fits-all”-exercise.
When scope and program setup are in place it is time to start the implementation, which we will cover in our next article.
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