Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMB) and organizations that have outgrown their home-grown ERP's and spreadsheets should undertake the ERP journey sooner than later for various reasons such as process optimization, scaling their business processes, etc... The imperative for maintaining a lean IT team, competing IT projects and other factors require an organizations to engage with an implementation partner that can stay with them through the ERP leap. In this article, I am going to address a few Do's and Dont's when engaging with implementation partners (most of these suggestions stay valid even if the implementation is done with internal/contract staff).
Internal SME's and Management Commitment:
The journey must start here! Your SME's have a full time job - you must be able to identify this CORE TEAM of business SME's that will be committed to staying on top of their project tasks and there should be absolute commitment from the Senior Management Team to make this happen. Whatever it takes to free up 30-70% of their time at various phases of the project should be done. Not keeping this focus is the prime reason for the failure or under delivery of many ERP projects.
Since the organization's priorities keep changing with customer demands, it is very easy to lose focus on the implementation project and develop a tendency of "we will deal with this later", which invariably comes back to hurt the project or post go live user adoption. New customer orders received, people turnover, projects that are running in parallel, changing business processes during the implementation process - are all factors that should be taken into account and evaluated at an pre-established rhythm throughout the project timeline.
The need for a Steering Committee formulated with members from the Senior Management Team cannot be overemphasized here. A committed Steering Committee is required to make the right calls on tough situations during the implementation.
Onsite / Onshore / Offshore Resources:
Having a team of onsite resources / consultants is perhaps the most intuitive staffing approach for an ERP implementation. However, in a cost-sensible, "connected" world, there could be other options. A mix of onsite / onshore / offshore resources can bring an optimized value for the implementation if it is managed well. Here are a few things to consider with this approach:
- Ask the implementation partner to provide the names and profiles of all the resources that will be working on the project.
- Interview most or all the resources, regardless of whether they are onsite / onshore / offshore.
- Ensure that the internal team develops a healthy and regular working relationship with the respective counterparts from the implementation partner.
- Ask for a weekly load chart for every resource from the implementation partner. There will be times in the implementation project where some of the resources may not be needed full time. Likewise, the PP (Production Planning) Onshore / Offshore resource may not be needed until some of the other configuration is in place, but there should be an onsite resource at the beginning of the project for requirements gathering. If the implementation partner has people and experience in managing projects at this level, it could be to your cost advantage.
- Do not hesitate to negotiate with the implementation partner regarding the skill sets engaged in the project. Normally, implementation partners will work with you to have the right resource mix that can work well with the organization, but many times, you need to ask!
Project Management and Governance:
It would be ideal to have a Project Manager from the organization as well as a dedicated Project Manager from the implementation partner to make sure that tasks keep moving on both sides. It is extremely important for your internal IT expert (s) involved in the project and the Project Managers to be in a great working relationship to resolve issues in an effective manner. There should not be a hesitation to escalate unresolved issues, especially organizational issues, to the Steering Committee to seek timely resolution. In general, it is common to identify organizational issues during ERP implementations that are representative of process bottlenecks, inefficiencies that have not been identified previously or have been neglected or people that are in love with archaic practices. If these issues are not resolved, they will in most cases result in project failures or poor user adoption in the respective areas.
The Enterprise Architect / The Guardian:
If the organization has on staff one or more qualified Enterprise Architect (s) that have a grasp on all the organizations business systems and the integration between these various systems, Great! The ideal Enterprise Architect should have experience in multiple modules of SAP, other related systems such as CRM and SRM, Business Intelligence, an optional PLM (if the organization requires it), document / content management systems, middle-ware and also be adept at managing vendors and evaluating different software systems with little or no guidance. If you have someone on your team with this kind of skill set, you should make sure that they are closely engaged in the implementation project. If you have someone with a subset of these skills, you should certainly consider hiring someone to complement and provide complete coverage for this skill set full time or part time, depending on the need. Preferably, this resource should not be from your implementation partner, so that they can completely represent the organization and be a true Guardian! This Enterprise Architect or The Guardian role could bring several failure points to the team's attention before they become realities and provide with valuable suggestions to make your implementation a great success!
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This does not cover all the aspects of an SAP (ERP) implementation, but could be a good start for someone that is starting fresh or a refresher for those experienced.
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