An ERP Implementation is typically a big project with critical business resources tied-up for a long time. The business resources representing the core teams perform validations of the solutions being developed to confirm they are supporting the business functions and are critical to achieve the business drivers targeted for the ROI calculations.
Per the ASUG surveys, 7 out of 10 projects do not achieve the ROI stated in the project justifications.
The major factors contributing to this situation are:
1. Implementing the Legacy business processes in the new system, not validating the best practices given by the Software vendor.
2. No training planned for core business teams in advance of the solution design phase to understand the standard functionality offered by the software vendor
3. Data Quality assessment and ERP Software mandates for Data Quality
Strict governance on change management
4. No communication within Project teams on the cross-functional dependencies
5. Failure to test the data and impact across multiple stake holders in the enterprise
6. Focus on the process testing with sample data and not simulating the real-time data scenarios
Challenges for different business groups
Product data/Customer data/Vendor data is a corporate asset across the enterprise and the executive stake holders are represented from Engineering, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Procurement, Finance and Information systems. Each of these functions or stake holder focus on his requirements and not validating the inter-dependencies within them
The challenges may be better addressed if a right implementation partner is selected, who have domain experience and as well as IT experience to ease many of the commonly encountered issues. The Implementation partner can help address the business re-engineering of the processes to suit the best practices and also help analyzing and closing the identified gaps.
For example, an Engineer can help optimize the PRODUCT based on marketing team surveys with the customers. Operations team may design an economical packaging to minimize the transportation overheads and based on customer requirements.
The Integrated view of the Product and good governance will enable the business to address the challenges mentioned. Any delay in addressing the critical issues will diffuse the business drivers and impact the ROI