The ever-changing ERP landscape guarantees that new obstacles will develop from year to year, increasing the already difficult jobs of CEOs, CFOs, and other executive leaders. Having an experienced ERP Consultant in your corner will make or break an ERP implementation. Our expert ERP Consultants will take inventory of the lessons learned throughout 2022 to prepare businesses looking to tackle and conquer an ERP implementation in 2023. This professional advice could, and most likely will, save the jobs of project managers around the world. To ensure the success of your next ERP implementation, learn from the experiences of seasoned ERP Consultants in this episode of The ERP Advisor.
The unfortunate reality is a vast majority of digital transformations fail, costing the business hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Neglecting key elements of an implementation will be detrimental to the project’s success, even after carefully preparing to undergo the transformation. To counter these common pitfalls, ERP Advisors Group has outlined the four most common oversights in an ERP implementation.
Many businesses dive into digital transformations without carefully considering all the resources necessary to successfully go-live. It is common for leaders to dismiss the implementation’s need for extensive human capital resources, even after attentively analyzing budget and technology concerns.
Prior to launching a project, carefully looking into associated implementation responsibilities and roles are necessary to ensure support over the course of the project. After clearly defining roles, project managers can begin assigning roles based on the current workforce and identifying gaps in available resources. With that valuable insight, they can hire outside or prepare internal resources to assume authority over their roles during the implementation.
On the same note, preparing to maintain key individuals' engagement throughout the project could save a failing implementation. It becomes an intricate dance for these individuals to balance their day job with the additional responsibilities associated with stepping up during a major digital transformation. Mitigating these risks is a vital step in preventing employees from detaching their focus during implementation.
Never underestimate the influence of incentivization on the workforce. Incentives do not need to be extravagant, in fact, simple gestures like providing food or hiring a massage therapist during go-live will go a long way with employees. However, providing bonuses to essential, senior team members is a sensible step in ensuring team morale. Ideas include providing additional vacation days after a go-live or gifting them a planned vacation. Remember, your team will be the key to your implementation success (or failure).
The greatest threat to achieving ERP implementation success is disregarding the intricate role of data migration. Data migration becomes dangerous when business leaders assume implementation partners will be managing data extraction, cleansing, and transformation. Implementation partners will load data into the new system but will not manage the necessary preparation to clean and validate the data. In fact, most partners have strict guidelines, building limits into their contracts where they will only load the data a set number of times before requesting additional fees. Additionally, partners are not responsible for uploads beyond the contractual agreement if the data is improperly prepared or rejected during the upload, resulting in the customer shouldering the data migration burden. Ignoring those responsibilities equates to compounding fees on the backend of the project, funding additional data loads.
Inexperienced and experienced leaders alike shutter at the thought of cleansing and transforming their data. Therefore, best practices for data migration would entail prepping data months before the go-live deadline and testing it at key points prior to go-live. These steps reduce the risk that the data will fail at go-live. At a minimum, remember the following points:
A. Make sure you have a data migration plan in place that covers all source systems, entities, customers, items, projects, etc.
B. Don’t start the data migration with bad data- have users do quick-hit cleaning by inactivating accounts, customers, and vendors, and removing junky records.
C. Find the right ERP tools to help automate the process.
D. Don’t try to do the migration all at once – it is a gradient process to understanding how the data will work in your new system. Perform dress rehearsals long before go-live to work out any flunks in your loads, giving you time to fix problems and resolve issues with differences in the new ERPs functionality.
E. Correctly estimate the required resources – it’s going to take a dedicated team to get the job done.
In this phase, do not underestimate the role of outside consulting resources to lead your project and data migration efforts. For more information, download the guide “Don’t Let Your Data Migration Become Your ERP Roadblock”.
Implementing out-of-the-box functionality is a best practice that promotes the continued viability of your new system for a long time into the future. Unfortunately, customization may become an inevitable part of your ERP implementation. So, what exactly does this mean for the business implementing system customizations?
Customizations can derail an implementation and eventually steer the solution off the upgrade path, making customizations generally taboo. Even so, customization can also be extremely necessary. It is a matter of being conservative with implementing customizations and going live without them when possible. Composable ERPs or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions may deflect the difficult decisions otherwise encountered with more rigid packaged applications. For greater insights into the “customization conundrum”, visit our blog, “Customization Conundrum: Best Practices for Implementing Your ERP System”.
While many factors can contribute to the downfall of an ERP implementation, the overlooked nuances will almost always prove detrimental. When planning for your ERP implementation, remember to account for these factors to dramatically increase the likelihood of a successful implementation.