First how an organization approaches the analysis of the ERP necessity can be addressed in the following types of activities. The organization needs to understand what the ERP can do for the company, what it can’t do, and know the company expected growth, goals, and strategy. Are they replacing all their legacy systems, across the entire company or just one or a few business units? Do they have the proper people on staff to help implement, to know the skills of …show more content…
Either a commercial off the shelf tool or developing an in house solution can be analyzed by understanding your business complexity. If your company is small you may choose to implement a cloud ERP solution, or if it is simple enough and you have the in house talent an in house solution would be a better choice. If your company is large and your processes do not align easily to the processes existing in the mainline ERP systems, you may need extensive customizations. So how do you choose, and what steps will get you to the correct decision?
According to the article for “9 Steps of Selecting and ERP System” by Schiff (2014), the following are good guiding principles to help you to the correct decision.
1. Obtain Upper Management …show more content…
Next you will need to involve technical IT Architects, Vendor Architects and Project Leads to help advise the sponsors, the implementation staff will need to be made up of key business users, IT members and the vendor team. You will need a OCM team to ensure all parties are communicating, keeping the users involved, trained and ready, management engaged and driving adoption. Last but certainly not least, you will need a strong dedicated Project Management team to shepherd the project through all the phases of the project to ensure project and people readiness for Go-Live and a solid Post Go-Live and sustainment plan.
There were many parallels in the discussion above as with the “Why ERP” book. We saw many times where choices were made without full involvement of the key people, full understanding, and proper due diligence to engage all the parties necessary to have a successful implementation. Billy and Mr. McDougal did only some of the ground work for an implementation, they did not follow the steps outlined above to ensure success, no change management, nor any type of user training, no project management to define and ensure Go-Live Readiness. They would have benefited in this