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All important lists in life consist of3,7,10 or12 items. Not5, not8, not11 and certainly not13. So, here is an interesting overview published by Maximus-IT: it summarizes better than any other article I have read up till now, the10 most important things to consider when planning to implement an ERP solution.
1. Money
The cost is always something that is going to be important. As a business, you have to justify any cost. More than whether or not something is affordable, you need to ascertain its value. This is most easily done by comparing its price with how it performs with the other factors on this list and comparing it with its competitors.
2. Integration
Given the sensitive data and the multi-functional uses of ERP, you need to consider and look into how much a new piece of software would implement itself into your business. Is it compatible with your other software, or is extra work needed to make it coherent? Extra work, of course, reduces its potential value. As an example, Microsoft Dynamics looks a lot like its Office suite, which makes for easier interface for most staff members.
3. Security
Given the sensitive data, from payroll to financial and personal information, it’s important to have a secure system. As such, every new piece of software needs to adhere to modern security standards and certificates. Security also ties into the cloud, as well as the process of integration. If your new software doesn’t integrate effectively enough, will that leave potential back-door exploits and holes in the system’s security?
4. Time
Likewise, this can also be seen as a waste of time. How much time does this software take to implement? On a similar note, you should also consider how much time it would take staff to be trained or become familiar with the new software. Failure to adapt quickly may affect other elements of your business, but taking time out to learn a completely new interface could present just as many problems.
5. Productivity
Similar to time, productivity is a key area. If this new software isn’t as intuitive as the existing system, for instance, your staff may be forced to input things manually. However, something that fits in more effectively and frees up your employees a bit more could increase potential productivity as a result.
6. Staff
As already hinted at, your choice of ERP software might also depend on your staff. If you have an in-house IT department, are they comfortable with your choice of software? More than making sure staff are familiar with it; it’s your IT staff that will be in charge of running, monitoring and keeping the software working. If they aren’t comfortable or able to adapt to your choice, you could run into potential problems.
7. Size of Company
Bigger companies arguably need to get more from their software. Your company size will affect a lot of things. How many people need to access it at once? How many different departments need to use the software between each other? This will also affect your computer network or system; smaller companies may not have the resources required to monitor your own dedicated servers.
8. Cloud v Client-Side Storage
There is a general move that is evident in a lot of ERP, including the likes of Oracle and Workday, to move to the cloud. Whether this is beneficial or not depends on both your practicality and the nature of your business. If you have sensitive information, for instance, you might want to trust and invest in your own secure servers. If you do go for cloud, the security and reliability of the remote server is important, but it does free up space, expenses and the sheer resources required to monitor your own servers.
9. Support and Backup
If something does go wrong, how well supported are you? Sometimes this is down to the software, such as whether it can keep backup files (another aspect of using the cloud you need to consider) or the actual company behind the software? A reliable company offering proper support, potential patches and other assistance is arguably a wiser investment. Also consider the benefits of SaaS, Software as a Service, as this encourages software providers to offer better support.
10. Growth Potential
Finally, what’s the future growth potential for both you and the software? All the previous factors can arguably be considered within this. If you’re expecting to shortly take on new staff then you need software that can cope, adapt and expand alongside your business.
If you have to improve your own servers or tweak your entire system/network to adapt, will the software transition be smooth? Likewise, you arguably want software near the beginning of its lifespan, but it’s difficult to determine exactly when. If it’s near the end, the provider is reducing its ongoing support and updates, which is bad for your future growth. Too early, and much of this might not be implemented yet. As a suggestion, you can tell a lot of this from the previous history, success and acclaim of the company providing and developing the software in question.
Requirement gathering is the base phase for successful ERP implementation but first we have to answer the question of how clear the requirement is and how far business is stable and mature, through initial evaluation of that will spot business size maturity short and long term management vision it will become clearer whether we should configure every fine setting with all the alteration and extensions (waterfall model) or we should keep as is standard areas until future stability and more mature requirements (Agile model).
A golden rule that serves well requirement gathering and scope control is the inside-outside frame approach; four standard resources to collect requirements from are user story, reports, SOP "Standard Operation Procedures" and on site observation. It's vital to put attentive risk management plan to mitigate weak links in this fundamental phase, for instance to start interviewing users after performing stakeholder analysis to spot useful and reliable information resource, if the business is new and reports are not yet clear it is recommended to introduce a set of best practice and standard reports instead of taking immature guesses as formal requirements. Gap analysis and final requirement write-up is the output of this important phase.
Once SOW is agreed documented and signed up a discipline of MOM and deliverables tracking routine should be in place through requirement log update and weekly/monthly meetings.
Today our industry is inundated with a plethora of ERP checklists. There are two problems with checklists: completeness and definition.
An ERP project is all about business process transformation with modern ERP technology. Therefore the requirements definition should focus on defining the future state of business processes and evaluating the ERP implementation against that future state business process model. The future state business process model becomes the requirements definition.
The ERP requirements definition becomes a script of business processes. Within the process script the function requirements are listed.
The vendor demonstration becomes a demonstration of the future state business processes. Think of the ERP demonstration as a “day in the life” process presentation. The demonstration starts with defining a product and then progresses through the sale process, the planning process, the production process, the shipment process, and the accounting process. Included in the presentation are engineering process, quality processes, warehouse processes, and human resources processes. The presentation requires the ERP vendors to use the client data.
