Your ERP Project
Your upcoming project
Your organization has grown over the years, and has a number of disparate business and computer software systems that have been cobbled together, and it has business processes that have been developed by scores of employees.
Perhaps you’ve acquired some competitor businesses or product lines along the way. You would now like to consolidate all of your computer and business systems—planning, supply chain, sales, marketing, finance, accounting, reporting, compliance, workflow, distribution, human resources, and more—into a single software system that provides seamless and uniform company-wide operation, reporting and at-a-glance status updates, while eliminating the many inefficiencies of the current systems.
Does that sum it up for your upcoming software integration project?
Here are some recommendations we make, to help you avoid the many pitfalls that put a major ERP transformation at risk.
What you need to get started:
- Select your Project Manager at the very beginning of the process;
- Let your Project Manager develop a highly detailed Project Plan and budget that realistically considers all of your project’s needs and changes that must occur in your business to accommodate the new operating system, employing accepted project methodologies and protocols;
- Involve your Project Manager in the selection of the appropriate software package and systems integrator or vendor; and
- Allow your Project Manager to coordinate all of the actions of your own team with the team of your systems integrator.
Why you need an independent consulting Project Manager
The general success rates of large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation projects:
- 33% of projects succeed on budget and on time;
- 33% more succeed, but not on budget and on time;
- 33% fail mid-project.
The cost of implementing a major change to your organization, like a new ERP system, is quite inexpensive compared with the cost of an unsuccessful or botched implementation. So our key message is do it right, the first time. Make sure your project is in the first 33 percent—on budget and on time.