5 Tips for Selecting and Implementing an ERP System
As digital transformation increases across industries, organizations must make crucial IT decisions in order to keep up with its speed. An excellent technique to combine existing data from different groups and departments and combine business operational data from across the entire organization into a single window is with an ERP system. But the cost of deploying an enterprise resource planning system includes the cost of licensing and maintenance and the time and resources devoted to it. And therefore, the decision on ERP implementation becomes important and crucial.
You must take a proper decision when choosing or changing an ERP system, or your business may suffer for years to come. Implementations that are successful are not just possible but also very typical. Simply knowing how to evaluate, plan, and carry out an organized ERP project will help you reduce those risks and reap the benefits more rapidly.
So, here’s an ERP selection and implementation guide with the assistance needed for a successful ERP deployment. Below are five tips for selecting and implementing ERP software for your company.
1. Obtain Backing from the Top Management
Companies that offer ERP solutions believe that companies that tend to struggle the most with ERP implementation and ERP processing are the ones that lack high management level involvement. Without the participation of upper-level personnel, resources at the lower level often tend not to be dedicated and involved with the implementation project.
But this doesn’t mean your executives have to get familiar with every configuration detail of your enterprise resource planning. However, they must first understand the issues impeding the project and become acquainted with the details.
2. Make a Comprehensive List of your Requirements
Before you go and get an ERP solution for your company, you should start by carefully evaluating and defining the scope of your project. You need to concentrate on particular system requirements and business operations. It will help if you analyze your vendors’ proposals that might be more detailed and as specific as they can be for a better understanding.
If you do one thing right and make it the up-front requirements collection process, your selection process becomes accessible and viable. Few factors can derail project budgets and schedules as “assumptive” or “missing” needs. Therefore, be careful to involve senior management, IT, and end users in the ERP selection for your company.
3. Keep Mobile Users in Mind
Always ensure your ERP is a provider of access on phone, virtualization, and RDP acceleration solutions. Moreover, exclusively accessing ERP systems from desktops is no longer an option as mobility is a concern for most companies.
Furthermore, spending too much on an ERP solution for your company and compromising on the basic features should never be an option. Please choose an ERP solution that enables your employees to be productive anywhere, anytime on their cellphones and tablets. But at the same time, it will also ensure that private information is protected.
4. Carefully Weigh your Options
Most of the time, a company that offers cloud-based ERP solutions believes that poorly managed and poorly planned evaluation projects can result in subpar deployments. And improper vendor selection might be caused by hazy requirement definitions and ambiguous priorities.
- Don’t forget that any delays in the evaluation process itself will ultimately cause the go-live date and the period for benefits to be realized to be delayed.
- Don’t overlook integration, either. An expensive piece of underused or unusable software is not an ERP solution if it does not integrate with your current critical and legacy office systems.
So, choose your provider carefully.
5. Get References.
Before you finally decide on your ERP provider, always remember to request at least three references from vendors while looking for an ERP solution provider. Then, ask their users what went well, what didn’t, and what they would have changed. A vendor might not have the required experience if they can’t give you at least three verified, satisfied clients. So always look for real case studies.
Ask your coworkers for ERP recommendations if you belong to an industry association.
Recognizing that the best training may not come from outside sources is crucial. There are always tech-savvy staff members in and around your departments that may know much more than you think. Some people can serve as knowledgeable resources for their coworkers and save you and your company a lot of time.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that a purchasing decision is always based on the cost, the value, and the likelihood of the product’s success for your company. You are really lucky if the proposal fits within your spending limit and provides everything you require. If the best option is too expensive, you’ll need to make some difficult choices.
Avoid the temptation to forgo essential functionality or user-friendliness in order to save money. Don’t cut corners on user training and implementation support, either. A small amount saved here will result in benefits lost that are many times the amount saved.
Author’s Bio:
Shawn Sauve, the Vice President and Global Dynamics Practice Lead at DynamicsSmartz – Microsoft Gold ERP and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Partner – will be the writer for this guest post. Shawn has been helping organizations grow by aligning the right people, processes, and technology.
