Taking a business-led approach to ERP implementation

IT can be a critical strategic driver to enterprise resource planning (ERP) programmes but it shouldn’t own them. ERP implementation is a business and people project, not a technology project.

Colin Gibbs, Head of Optimisation at Pace, believes business ownership is critical to the successful implementation, adoption and sustained improvement of an ERP system.

Done best, an ERP project is a key enabler to delivering your strategy. It will help you achieve your strategic objectives and take away the admin burden, complexity and inefficiency in jobs, so that your people can focus on the activities that drive value for your organisation.

Engaging your people from day one to get a clear understanding of who does what, what your systems do and what your future requirements will be will ensure you give them a tool that meets their needs.

Gibbs says: “If you only bring your technology team to the table in a workshop, it’s not the same as the business user that ultimately needs ERP as a tool to do their job. You’ve got to get the right people in the room.”

While your IT team can help hold your technology vendor to account on behalf of the business – as they speak the same language and are familiar with how your current system works – the best approach is where the business owns the process. Analysts quote a 60-80% project failure rate for ERP projects that don’t follow this approach.

Gibbs says: “We work with your business people directly from the outset to understand what it is that they need, what they want, and what’s gone wrong, giving people the opportunity to articulate their pain points and improvement opportunities. So, it becomes their system. It’s a tool for your people to use in their jobs.”

A clear and truly end-to-end business process will ensure that when the business chooses to adopt standard ERP functionality, it can understand the change impact on people, process, technology and data. From the discovery phase, Pace provides organisations with a robust set of documentation describing how your business works and how the system works together.

Gibbs says: “That’s a really powerful and valuable asset that you can use for ongoing change management and governance of change.

“Once the system is up and running, we know that changes will be coming thick and fast. New generations of ERP systems are often Cloud-based and changes are implemented on a regular basis, and you don’t necessarily have control over whether or not they’re implemented or when they are implemented. The ability to respond rapidly to those changes, predict when they will be, and implement them painlessly for the business is a really significant advantage.”

Schedule a call to discuss how Pace can help with your ERP implementation.