It’s no small matter to replace your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. By definition, ERP is your information backbone and reaches into all areas of your business and value chain. Replacing it can be a difficult and painful process. When it is done correctly, it can open unlimited business opportunities. The cornerstone of this effort is finding the right partner and solution to simplify this difficult transition.
Companies decide to replace their ERP systems for a variety of reasons. At the most fundamental level, the issue is whether your current system supports or constrains your ability to execute business strategies that will make your company successful and establish it as an industry leader. Your ERP provider must be part of your vision. They must have faced these challenges many times in their history and learned how to help companies adopt new technologies. The future of your business depends on whether your ERP provider has made the leap from one technology curve to the next
and can continue to innovate and deliver technologies that help businesses like yours be industry leaders.
1–A Future Proof Decision
To understand what the next ten years will bring for your company, and what impact those changes will have, look at the last ten years and double that rate of change. Technology will provide information to the knowledge worker at any time on any device. Information will be personalized and will anticipate the needs and activities of every organizational role. ERP will focus on providing the data customers need to make decisions, on exceptions and on automating routine daily processes. And your ERP will have to adapt to new business and technology strategies that few of us can accurately predict today.
To that end, look for an ERP vendor with a reputation for agility in accommodating new market needs. History is the best predictor of the future. It is important to find vendors with a history of delivering new
technologies and solutions such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), lean strategies, workflow and e-business that streamline and automate business operations and processes. Quite simply, by using enterprise applications based on an SOA, you can easily add new functionality in a highly granular fashion, as you need it, and can easily reconfigure workflows with minimal integration costs or impact on your business operations.
You can also use Web services to more easily communicate with and streamline workflows involving customers and suppliers over the Internet. With an SOA, you can make functional areas within your enterprise application available to other authorized systems over the Internet. For example, you can make your internal systems available directly to your customers’ purchasing systems, allowing the
two systems to function as a single system via the SOA. As a result, Web services can transform
relationships between business partners into a real time relationship.
2 – Tailor-Made Business Fit
No two businesses are alike. You therefore don’t want a ”cookie cutter” approach to setting up your system. Whether you are modelling currently effective processes or reengineering and improving ineffective processes to support new strategies, the solution’s design give it the ability to create a tailor-made solution for your company.
A variety of utilities in the base system will allow you to customize your system. Custom screens, menus, and prompts can be set up to mirror the way you operate. Standard online business forms (e.g., invoices) can be merged with data from your system when printed. Make sure the system includes an extensive set of standard, multipurpose forms, and an easy to use forms builder tool to modify or create forms if needed. You will undoubtedly need to develop custom reports in addition to the wide range of standard system reports.
You should also look for tools that allow data access and reporting without the need for programming knowledge or technical orientation. Such a tool gives you access to your data and its uses are limited only by your creativity, not your computer expertise. With report writer and table writer features, you can produce custom reports using data from multiple files. A connectivity feature allows you to download data to a file on your PC to analyze and chart, generate forecasts, and perform decision support analysis without fear of corrupting the integrity of ”live” data.
Workflow technologies put data into the hands of those who need it, when they need it, with automated messaging, reminders, monitoring and company-wide interactive communication systems. The key workflow components required are: 1) an event-driven system to manage and coordinate business processes and associated information, 2) on-line communication and prompting for required actions, and 3) tracking and monitoring activities. Together, these workflow components can be pivotal in helping you achieve corporate and system replacement goals. They can be used to improve quality and reduce rework and costs by automating engineering change order management, reduce lead times through better supply chain collaboration and visibility, and enhance customer satisfaction through faster and more accurate communication with customers.
4–Industry Expertise
With extensive industry experience and expertise, a vendor will be equipped to offer you the kinds of support services and tools that allow you to successfully solve your most difficult business challenges, rapidly deploy applications, and maximize your return on investment. Yet, organizations often report that the weakest link in IT implementations is consulting expertise, so make sure the vendor’s staff of design professionals, systems analysts, technical, consultants, and financial experts understand your industry inside and out. In addition, they need to know how to provide you with the most cost-effective software solutions.
Look closer to verify that the software provider maintains a highly skilled work force and industry experienced owner-managers that ensure their long term ability to serve your company into the future. On the front line, the team should consist of a consulting project lead, a financial specialist, and an industry specialist. Look for seasoned experts, who have real-world experience as well as consultants certified by industry associations.
4 – Delivering Return on Investment
For more than two decades, organizations have seen their highest ROI come from their ERP. This is due to strategic ERP solutions that streamline, integrate, automate and improve operations in companies around the globe. An extended ERP solution justifies these investments by managing processes across your value chain. Some of the results of this coordinated effort that
help you achieve the maximum return on investment with the shortest payback period include improved profit margins, streamlined communications, improved customer loyalty, and increased visibility.
On the investment side, the ability to provide a lower cost of ownership solution is a result of three factors. First, is the system as functionally rich as tier-one solutions that are targeted for Fortune 500 companies, but with an initial investment that is a small fraction of the cost? An intense focus on programming development for the needs of mid-sized companies as well as efficiency of implementation results in providing the same level of functionality at a lower cost. Second, the reduced maintenance cost alone, based on the lower software cost, can minimize, if not pay for, the cost of replacing an existing system. Third, the system architecture and underlying technologies, such as the embedded database, require minimal support, people, and resources to maintain—far lower than most other tier-one and even more comparable tier-two systems.
Rashed Khan holds an MSc in Software Engineering and loves guest posting on Business/technology related topics. Click here to follow Rashed on Twitter.