- Delivering value from your ERP system is hard work. In 2012, under half of organizations who recently implemented an ERP system realized the value they expected from their ERP system.
- Customizing your ERP system is extremely expensive and often pushes you off the path to upgrade.
- Focusing on configuration will deliver ERP value with minimal effort and increase overall end user satisfaction.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Your ERP system is not about the technology, it’s about the business processes and the people using the system. Focus on these two aspects as a cost effective way to optimize your ERP system.
- Some business processes need customization, but most don’t. Identifying which ones are key to your business will help you hone in on where the effort should be best spent.
- Discovery workshops are the key to rapidly changing a business process. Build discovery workshops to speed up the optimization process.
- You can’t forget to manage the change at the organizational level. Academic research points to a lack of change as one of the key reasons ERP implementations don’t deliver the estimated benefit.
Impact and Result
- Prioritize business processes that are key to your organization’s success.
- Develop discovery workshops that will uncover easy-to-fix configuration problems that will deliver ERP value and improve collaboration in your organization.
- Improve key process performance indicators such as, cycle time, defect rates, and service delays.
- Introduce ERP optimization as a standard procedure that IT will perform on a regular basis.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
4Wall Entertainment
Guided Implementation
10/10
$12,399
10
Gleb was very knowledgeable and his advice sparked several ideas that I had not thought of. It's experts like Gleb that make using Info-Tech Resea... Read More
Workshop: Optimize Business Processes to Limit ERP Customization
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Get Prepared for ERP Optimization
The Purpose
- Define your ERP process optimization SOP
- Identify business processes that are key for your organization’s success
- Assess business processes by cost, satisfaction, and opportinuity for improvement
- Prioritize business processes to obtain optimization focus
Key Benefits Achieved
- Complete assessment of all business processes in your organization with cost, satisfaction, and opportunity metrics captured and collected
- Prioritized list of business processes that are key to your organization’s success
- Root cause analysis performed to help identify which future course should be taken to fix the suboptimal business processes
Activities
Outputs
Right-size the ERP process optimization SOP
- Developed ERP process optimization SOP
Identify enterprise priorities
- Identified which business processes are the most important to your organization’s strategy
Provide relevance rankings
- Gathered primary data relating to the satisfaction, cost, and opportunity of different business processes
Assess satisfaction, cost, and opportunity
- Performed root cause analysis to determine the future course of intervention
Generate process optimization plot
- Generated process optimization plot to identify which business processes should be prioritized
Determine course of intervention
Estimate cost and risks of intervention
- Generated data for the business cost, taking into account costs and risks of intervention
Module 2: Develop ERP Optimization Schedule of Activities
The Purpose
- Build discovery workshop activities that will deliver ERP value
- Develop project proposal to guide further optimization efforts
- Understand the components of change that exist when optimizing business processes
- Identify best practices for the documentation, training, and monitoring of optimized business processes
Key Benefits Achieved
- Thorough understanding of the seven different workshop activities that will drive the ERP optimization effort
- Developed project proposals that can be used to launch further optimization projects
- Comprehensive launch plan developed by embracing training, documentation, and monitoring best practices
Activities
Outputs
Build an engaging workshop facilitation guide
- Fully developed facilitation PowerPoint deck
Establish process ownership
- Assigned process owners to each relevant business process
Build process operator workshop teams
- Developed list of workshop partcipants for discovery workshops
Overview of all workshop activities
- Reviewed all workshop activities
Build project proposals
- Finalized project proposals
Prepare for launch of the optimized processes
- Thorough understanding of the change management issues associated with ERP optimization