Another cornerstone in the foundation of your company’s successful ERP implementation is your set of North Star principles.
The North Star is another term for what navigators past and present call “the pole star” – a star both visible and prominent in the night sky, and which aligns itself unswervingly with the planet’s northern celestial pole.
On Earth, our North Star is called Polaris. (Fun Astronomical Fact: what we call the North Star is actually three stars that appear as one to the naked human eye.) If you find yourself lost, you can always look up. By identifying Polaris in the night sky, you’ll always know which direction is north and be able to guide yourself home from there.
Businesses function in much the same way. The most successful enterprises maintain a unique set of goals or targets by which they guide themselves on the path to success.
The company that doesn’t establish and constantly reflect upon its North Star principles is much more likely to find itself wandering directionless in the hinterlands of its industry sector until, exhausted and confused, it simply collapses.
Successful ERP implementations also establish and follow North Star principles. These principles include what we at EstesGroup call your critical success factors: the benchmarks your organization feels it must achieve through its ERP implementation to consider the project successful.
Critical success factors vary from enterprise to enterprise. They can include such criteria as speeding the delivery of goods to market; quantifiably streamlining the work hours required to reach various forms of compliance; increasing overall profits by a mandated requirement; reducing your business’s overall costs on back office processes; and so on.
If you haven’t clarified the North Star principles of your enterprise, don’t worry. EstesGroup can leverage its tested Business Process Review to examine the current state of your business and work with your stakeholders to identify, develop, and solidify principles that will lead to your ultimate satisfaction.
North Star principles are so important to your business and its successful ERP implementation that we always concretize these factors before diving into the complex work that follows.
If you read Part One of this series carefully, you know what we at EstesGroup have learned through hard-won experience. We consider four factors mission-critical to the success of any Business Process Implementation (BPI). Once again, those factors are:
Executive Sponsorship
Project Organization
North Star Principles
Proper Resources
Given our emphasis on these four points, it may not surprise you to hear the following:
When EstesGroup is called upon to consult on failed Business Process Implementation, we typically find that one or all of these four key points was completely ignored during the client’s ERP implementation.
No wonder their implementation failed. Consider what the client was working against.
It had no general commanding its army (Executive Sponsorship).
The implementation team set out without a concrete plan of attack (Project Organization).
The implementation process commenced without first nailing down the outcomes considered mandatory for success, or without communicating these outcomes to the implementation staff (North Star Principles).
Finally and perhaps most harmful to the overall process:
The implementation effort was expected to produce win without being assigned the proper personnel, budget, or time frame to do so (Resources).
At this point in our blog series, we’d like to suggest the proper mindset for a successful ERP implementation.
Hiring an ERP consultant is never enough.
Successful Business Process Implementations are a marriage of equals. The client organization must bring as much to the table as the implementation specialists do.
ERP implementations involve a lot of hard work. They most certainly involve the client company because no one knows their business better than its employees know it.
Good ERP consultants don’t wave magic wands to produce success. We partner with our clients and draw from their expertise to understand their business as best we can. Only then can we help them understand how to improve their business processes and express them as data within the chosen ERP solution.
Deficiency in any one of the four Project Roles can (and most likely will) lead to an unsuccessful project implementation.
With this in mind, let’s drill deeper into each of the four Project Roles so that you and your business can prepare yourself properly for the BPI that takes your enterprise to the next level.
If your business is looking for the best team to assess a faulty Business Process Implementation, look no further.
Quite often, we at EstesGroup get called upon to assess (read: consult upon) a deficient ERP system. The scenario goes something like this:
A client comes to us knowing that something is amiss. Their ERP solution doesn’t function the way its implementers promised it would. Perhaps reporting features have stopped working, or information isn’t available in real time. Perhaps processes that the system should track aren’t falling into the workflow. Maybe information that should be available throughout the entire organization only filters down to a few departments.
While the specifics differ on a case-by-case basis, the core situation stays constant:
Clients contact us because their ERP system fails to meet expectations, and inefficiencies should not be the product of Business Process Reengineering.
Always remember: The ERP solution that’s the right fit right for your business should solve problems, not create them.
Having troubleshot many such cases, EstesGroup knows there are three general culprits for malfunction:
The chosen software may not have been a good fit for the business in the first place.
The implementation partner may not have had the capabilities or the understanding of your business to deliver the system with proper due diligence.
The problems might be produced internally. Meaning that the enterprise’s workflows doesn’t correlate to streamlined expressions in their ERP solution.
Each times EstesGroup consultants on a standing Business Process Implementation, we begin by examining the project’s four Project Roles. These include:
Executive Sponsorship
Does the project have an informed patron or patrons at the executive level who understand the importance of an ERP system? Are these individuals willing and able to marshal and commit the resources required to make the proper implementation viable? Without an engaged and motivated executive sponsor – someone who can marry the organization’s vision to its expression in Enterprise Resource Planning software – most ERP implementations can and will fall flat on their faces.
Project Organization
The structure of a project is critical to its success. EstesGroup examines the implementation team’s reporting and documentation protocols to see if these workflows allowed errors to occur and breed during business process construction. In essence, we’re looking to see if the organization was set up to support a proper implementation in the first place. If it wasn’t, we’ve found a likely place to begin making recommendations.
North Star Principles
Structure is dictated by vision. Does anyone jump in their car and try to get someplace specific without having directions? Of course not. That sort of thinking defies logic. ERP implementations are no different. You have to have a clear idea of where you want to go before you can get there. Clear ideas of what constitutes success are what we at EstesGroup define as your organization’s North Star principles. Please note that North Star principles extend far beyond ordinary project metrics like accomplishing the implementation on time and at or under budget. Rather, they encompass the expected outcomes that made you want to undergo Business Process Reeingeering in the first place: the expected outcomes by which (and only with which) your organization will consider its ERP implementation a success.
Proper Resources
A lack of proper resources is the number one reason we at EstesGroup see most ERP implementations fail. Did the client organization allocate the proper personnel to the implementation? Did they give them enough bandwidth to function properly (time, budget, and oversight)? Did they build in phases to model each workflow properly before setting it in stone?
This blog series will examine each of these Project Roles in turn, and other factors that equate to a successful ERP implementation.
Click here to read TROUBLESHOOTING PROBLEMATIC ERP IMPLEMENTATIONS PART TWO: THE UNDERLYING ASSUMPTION FOR SUCCESS
In Parts One and Two of this blog, we offered ERP implementation tips and outlined the roles played by the various actors in your company’s implantation team and that of the EstesGroup to ensure successful implementation of your chosen ERP solution.
As you might imagine, it takes a high degree of ERP collaboration to keep all the moving parts of a project humming synchronously.
So how do we do it?
Foremost among our tools of the trade for keeping a project on track is the PID, or Project Initiation Document. Think of our PID as the all-encompassing business plan for your successful ERP implementation.
An EstesGroup PID lists:
Your company’s critical success factors
The overall scope of the implantation project
Assumptions and risks
The project’s timeline
Roles and responsibilities of each participant from each implementation team
A Communication Plan which establishes basic protocols while spelling out Stage Reviews and Audits
Project milestones
Another key driver of successful implementation team coordination is our Totally Transparent Project Planning and Metrics. EstesGroup uses online based project management software. At any time from anywhere, your team members can log on and check the up-to-the-second status of your implementation effort. Our project management software features simple, informative dashboards that provide total clarity into project categories such as Time, Cost, Resource, Risks, Issues, and Changes.
Finally, we employ Gantt Charts to their maximum effectiveness. Our charts clearly and meticulously break down each task that needs to be done on open activity lists. This way, the resources assigned to handle each task can finish them properly and in a timely fashion to facilitate overall project success.
By properly using the three tools outlined above, your team and ours will communicate effectively and proceed swiftly over the oft-times complicated landscape of your ERP.
Give us an hour of your time and we WILL make your business run better.
In Part One of this blog for ERP system implementation tips, we outlined the Estes Group specialists we will assigned to your ERP implementation, and the specific roles they will play to ensure success of your project.
But as we’ve said, every project is a partnership — a meeting of minds, specialities, and expertise from your company and ours are what make a successful ERP collaboration strategy.
So who are the people we hope to work with from your enterprise? What will their ERP implementation roles and responsibilities be in creating the most effective implementation of your chosen ERP solution?
For our ERP collaboration strategy, we always prefer that our clients have a well-informed Project Sponsor who takes an active role in your implementation project. Your Project Sponsor is almost always a company executive: the CEO, CFO, or President. Ideally, this person sees your ERP implementation as we see it: the best opportunity for your enterprise to retain or advance its competitive edge in your sector.
Over the years, we’ve managed to accumulate a lot of success stories at EstesGroup. By far the best and most frequent success stories share a common, pivotal character. They all have a client-side Project Sponsor with a clear and specific future state vision. Someone who’s as excited to implement your chosen ERP solution as we are.
We’ve noticed a huge difference between clients with active, interested implementation sponsorship and more laid back approaches. One of the best ERP system implementation tips we can give is that the active, interested Project Sponsor sets the tone for the entire implementation.His or her energy becomes contagious. The encouragement, guidance, resources and advocacy they provide is invaluable.
Your Project Sponsor will chair your project’s Steering Committee, which is typically comprised of executives from VP to C-level. Responsibilities of the Steering Committee include:
Ensuring project success
Establishing company goals and priorities
Defining the project scope and approving any changes that occur
Providing adequate resources to ensure the project’s success
Monitoring project milestones to make sure they’re met
Your team will also have a Project Manager tasked with synchronizing all the various moving parts of your ERP implementation. Your Project Manager shoulders the bulk of the day-to-day work required to make your implementation successful. His or her specific responsibilities include:
Learning and following the EstesGroup 5-stage implementation methodology
Managing resource participation
Assigning specific tasks to your Customer Core Team members
Conducting meetings of the overall implementation project team
Reporting progress to your Steering Committee
Your Customer Core Team is often comprised of your unit managers, line managers, and subject matter experts. As part of our ERP collaboration strategy, your core team members and ours interact directly, as counterparts, to ensure seamless communication between the specific processes of your enterprise and the ERP solution being implemented to handle them.
Responsibilities of your Customer Core Team members include:
Following the methodology plan as led by the Project Manager
Executing all individual tasks with the skill required to maximize the overall implementation
Participating fully in the proof of concept and all subsequent reviews
Preparing and reviewing policies, procedures, and data conversion
Documenting progress
Training end users and co-workers
Presenting stage reviews
Click here to read about successful ERP collaboration with both teams.
You’ve probably heard that it takes two to tango. And you know what that means:
A successful working relationship requires that each partner works toward a common goal, and understands which tasks they’re individually responsible for so the team can meet that goal.
Effective collaboration can only occur once these two conditions are met.
So what are the responsibilities we expect from your implementation team and ours in terms of developing a successful ERP implementation methodology?
Let’s first deal with roles and responsibilities for the EstesGroup side of our ERP implementation team strategy.
Your enterprise will always enjoy the direct involvement of our Vice President of Professional Services, who will always have one simple but important responsibility: to make sure that your firm becomes an enthusiastic reference for other prospective customers.
We want your project experience to be so good that you run out and tell all your peers about what great work we did. That our ERP implementation methodology broke down all the growth barriers you were experiencing and took all the pain out of your ERP implementation. Over the years, we’ve found that, when we guide our actions by this simple northstar principle, everything else that must happen to create a successful ERP implementation team strategy falls into place.
As part of our ERP implementation team strategy, your implementation will be led by our hand-picked Project Manager on a day-to-day level. The Project plays a very important role. He or she sets the ERP implementation methodology beat to which both your implementation team and ours will march toward success.
A big part of his or her job is keeping your team several steps ahead of the ERP implementation methodology. Doing this allows you to participate more fully in the ERP implementation. In the long run, it also saves time and creates a less ambiguous, more enjoyable. project environment.
Specific responsibilities of your Project Manager include:
Teaching your enterprise how to get the most from our 5-stage methodology
Monitoring methodology adherence
Defining project goals and objectives
Providing regular feedback
Participating in stage reviews
Executing project plans
Finally, our Customer Core Team will execute the mechanics of your implementation. As part of our ERP implementation team strategy, we only select core team members who get a buzz out of problem solving. These are seasoned professionals who think constantly about how to best model your enterprise processes to secure and advance your company’s competitive edge.
Specific responsibilities of your Customer Core Team members include:
Following the methodology plan as led by the Project Manager
Executing all individual tasks with the skill required to maximize the overall implementation
Participating fully in the proof of concept and all subsequent reviews
Preparing and reviewing policies, procedures, and data conversion
