Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
The critical most factor of the ERP implementation is the "Change
Management Factor" and most of the organizations have failed
in their endeavor due only for not being able to manage the change
within the organization, while implementing ERP. The challenges
that your organization will face can be summarized as follows and
someone within the organization should go through the list and check
out the readiness of the organization to check its compatibility.
A. Strategic Planning
B. Business Planning
C. Process Mapping
D. Process Alignment, Tweaking or
Reengineering
E. Bench-Marking and Best Practices
F. Performance Management
G. Change Management
H. Functional Modeling
A. Most of the ERP systems have a built-in module for Strategic
Planning that kind of feeds to most of the other modules. This is
a key module of the system and therefore, needs to be set up from
the start of the project. It is customary for most of the failed
ERP projects not to implement the Strategic Module rather go for
the Financial Module first. This type of implementation prioritization
causes the ERP system loose its valor and capacity, thereby turning
it into mechanization process rather than an automation process.
I would highly recommend that you go for a full blown out strategic
planning before going into a full blown out implementation of ERP.
B. I would therefore, suggest a full visioning session for your
organization, whereby, you will elicit or develop a visioning document
that will address both the long, mid and short term strategies.
This strategy document will then be translated into a business plan
document. The business plan will help the ERP system evaluate the
performance of each department and function in terms of their business
and organizational developmental performances.
C. The next step should be the process mapping task. In this task,
you will plot each of the processes that your organization undertakes
and detail them out showing their time, controls, productivity,
duplications, bottle necks, resources and quality assurance aspects.
This task will be a major undertaking because this will somehow
put all your activities in black and white and that will be a major
into your ERP system.
D. Then comes another critical task that would evaluate your processes
to see how effective they are and whether or not you will need to
change, reengineer or tweak some of your processes to improve your
overall productivity and efficiency. This process might take some
time and that you may need to do this in phases rather than doing
it all at once. You might need to prioritize the tweaking process.
E. Once you have streamlined, tweaked or reengineered your processes,
you need to set-up a bench-mark for your organization that will
become your target as to what you want to achieve in both short
and long term objectives. The bench-marking can be a process whereby,
you might want to utilize the best practices of a given function
or you might want to take another successful company as your target
and set yourself up to achieving their performance in the long run
and you will need to translate those long-term bench-mark into short
term objectives that you will monitor for you’re your organization
using the ERP.
F. The essence of an ERP is the ability of an organization to set
your performance targets and monitor them constantly and realign
the targets well ahead of time to avert any potential ditches on
the way. Performance of any organization is setup using the four
factors, financial, organizational development, institutional learning,
and resource management. This is the core of the ERP system and
therefore, requires a very in depth planning process to benefit
from the full power of the ERP system. During this task, you will
need to translate your business plan into individual departmental
performances using those four factors and create some tangible outcome
that you will be able to monitor using those indicators that you
had set up originally.
G. Change Management is the most critical factors of all. This
can make or break the future of your organization in implementing
the ERP and then getting the full blast benefit of an ERP implementation.
The purpose of this task is to ensure that your organization is
ready to handle the change within the organization. An ERP is definitely
going to change the way your organization would work and that is
not only a physical change but a cultural one too and therefore
will be a time consuming process. This project needs to setup the
tone and the environment for the changes to take its roots.
H. The Functional Modeling would be a limited model of the actual
implementation whereby, the ERP systems, their integration and internal
controls will have been fully described process by process and the
scenarios of implementation will also be set as such.
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