Business Transformation: What you need to know

Too often we see small companies that see a software demo, buy the ERP system and then struggle to implement, if they get the system up and running at all.

Instead of focusing on fully documenting and mapping the current and future state in these functional areas, the team jumped directly to vendor demos without a clear vision of how a new ERP system would add value.

As one of the managers noted, the project got “lost in the weeds” in features and functions without a clear sense of the correct path to business performance improvements. As he so aptly noted, “we didn’t know what we didn’t know.”

Fortunately for them, they did not make any purchase nor did they get anywhere near ERP implementation, since they realized early on that they didn’t know how to go about the process of selection.

For businesses, it is critical that the project recovery focus on business transformation as opposed to simply looking at ERP systems.

Companies need to create a vision of the future state from the current state and help define the business value for the project. They should be able to pull multiple functions together into a single discussion and have multiple divisions speaking to the same solution

The ERP consultant team must focus on business process mapping in key functional areas which need streamlining and reducing wasted effort.

This more strategic approach helps alleviate the shortcomings of the past. It also establishes alignment of expectations with management, improve the efficiency of the team, eliminate process waste, and reduced the time to benefit for the project.

ERP projects fail for a variety of a reasons. When functional areas and departments don’t have a chance to confer with stakeholders to set ERP System requirements, clearly defining expectations, milestones, or resource requirements based on the scope of the project – a less than ideal outcome follows.