29 Jun 2017
5 Key Risk Areas You Need to Focus on While Optimizing Your ERP Implementation
Purchasing an ERP software solutions can be a long and tiring process but undoubtedly it will add a significant value to your organization operation and business flow. However, the purchase is just 1 part of everything. A company also need to take note of its implementation process and the end-user transition. This is where most companies face trouble. An ERP system in most cases if it is not implemented properly, will lead to decreased ROI, exposure to probable vulnerabilities and so on. Here we have enlisted 5 key risk areas you should take care of in order to align your ERP implementation with your end goals.
- Overall project control
In order to implement your ERP properly, it is essential that proper attention is paid on various nuances related to the actual budget and timeline you want the implementation to be executed within. In addition, it is essential that pre-deployment activities like vendor, software and version selection, along with other deployment strategies are successfully studied and analyzed. Failure of any of these processes beforehand might lead to delays and expectation gaps during implementation processes.
- Business needs
When implementing ERP system, accurate workflow and business requirements must already be documented and discuss upon with the ERP vendor. This will allow the vendor to customize according to your requirement and minimize any process flow gaps. Ineffective implementation can produce several risks such as poor alignment of ERP system to business operations, on-going errors that were overlooked during implementation due to inadequate testing and unnecessary custom features.
- Data classification
It is essential to understand that ERP implementation or upgrade may require data migration between servers and it will be crucial to keep your data well maintained to ensure smooth data migration over different servers. The potential risk is you might lose your sensitive data or might fail to migrate data properly into the new system, this will cause a considerable set back if data is not available after data migration. Thus it is important to classify your data and ensure proper planning with the ERP vendor for a smooth data migration.
- Training & Implementation
End users are vital to the success of any ERP implementation. The project team handling ERP implementation must encourage effective communication between themselves and the end user. Training to equip users with the skills to transit forward is critical. If any of the mentioned steps are not handled well, it will cause users to feel distrust towards the ERP implementation and loss of confidence in the system itself.
- Post implementation risk
After implementation is done and the system is ready to live-run, future discussion and post implementation service support will need to be detailed. It is common that once implementation is done, companies face a lack of support from the vendors which made it hard for companies to deal with emerging issues. Some ERP vendors may have a 3rd party company to assist in post-live run support, even so, support details must be negotiated and made clear to all parties. This is to minimize any future conflict and ensure that problems that arise in the future can be solved easily.
