Key Takeaways: Is Your ERP Outdated? – Reviewing, Evaluating and Managing Change

The panel considered important elements of this topic during the conversation moderated by Consulting Magazine's Michael Webb Wednesday, May 31. If you were unable to attend, you may go here and register by clicking the "Access On-Demand Webinar" button.

Thank you to Velosio for sponsoring this fascinating webinar discussion. Thanks and appreciation also goes out to our distinguished panelists for their time and insightful commentary on this topic:

• James Thomas, Industry Director, Project Business, Velosio
• George Penton, Partner, ScottMadden, Inc

What was learned during the discussion? The following is a brief recap of some key takeaways from the webinar:

What are the key elements that are important to evaluating current ERP Systems?

• When examining your existing system ask yourself–Is the project central to your system? Is every financial transaction that you need to put in the system capable of being related to a project and impacting the project in some way?
• Determine if you have control over your project operations—do you have disparate processes? It's very difficult to institutionalize business processes that go across multiple disparate applications because of its disjointed nature.
• Understand that ERP effectiveness requires all-around data and business insights. AND understand that all the valuable information is not always within the system. People have information in their heads, but it's not always documented.
• If you begin to see the introduction of manual processes—workarounds and Excel spreadsheet jockeying, these are indications that you are not maximizing the effectiveness of your E R P.
• There's a significant cost to not keeping your system current and not operating your system to its utmost capabilities. Companies make a significant investment in their ERP platforms. But companies sometimes fail to start with the mindset of continuous improvement beyond their initial investment or implementation.

Process Management:

• It is important to treat ERP implementations, not just as another tool, but as opportunities to transform how your organization operates. Many times companies implement ERPs, but don't implement the continuous improvement teams or ongoing system training necessary to ensure the features and functions actually benefit ongoing operations.
• Along with implementing a new system, an infrastructure to support that system should be a part of the constant evolution of the organization.
• Adoption is key. If you don't take the training and support measures to gain high system adoption, the benefits will be diminished.
• Use the project as a transformational change mechanism and make people part of that change every step of the way, from inception through completion and as importantly, beyond.
• Oftentimes people view change management as the training that happens at the end of the project. It's key to get people involved and enthusiastic about the system and the process.
• Get stakeholders involved. Make sure messaging clarifies that the project is not just a mission that the back office, IT department and finance are doing, but actually something that will transform the organization and change how you do business.
• If your people don't embrace the system, they will see it as a training exercise or something that's being forced on them and adoption suffers. Which results in garbage in, garbage out and poor data quality and lack of compliance to the process sets in.

What factors are important in determining, determining value of new implementation?

• First, you need to understand what the overall goals are for the system. What are the desired outcomes that the stakeholders want? Then work down through those needs in terms of determining where inefficiencies exist and where processes are not aligned with those goals.
• Benchmark your KPIs with your peers. Examples of these KPIs are things like project gross margin, net operating income, billable utilization and repeatable revenues.
• Making the project a priority and making sure that you have the right resources is critical. There is definite risk taking it on and, and failing to allocate or redirect sufficient resources.

What lessons or mistakes can we learn from?

• Really taking the time to fully understand your current state is critical. Not understanding it can be extremely costly. If you go through a vendor selection process and hire the vendor, and that vendor shows up to kick off your project, and you don't have a full understanding of your current state processes, it creates a missed requirements down downstream that, then become problems in the implementation, cost overruns and delays.
• Avoid the pitfalls of recreating the past or trying to replicate your old processes in the new system, because nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. If your peer is doing it successfully one way, you might be wise to adopt it. Don't dismiss built-in best practices!
• Don't take for granted how people learn and how people absorb information.
• Adapt your change management processes to your training, and use an approach to training targeting each of those varied populations. Each of those functions, and professionals (say accountants) may absorb things differently than people in the field. Adapt to those different needs and those different populations and, and how they learn.

Register and view the webinar On-Demand here.