Reliable Methods and Practices to Manage End-to-End Business Processes in Your ERP System

It is very unfortunate that many ERP systems fail to deliver the business benefits which are expected by the organizations who opt for implementation. Many organizations experience misalignment between the ERP systems and business operations which gets worsens with time as companies go towards internal expansion, acquisitions or other changes. Major reason of failure in achieving the business benefits is the operational misalignment of business processes. Most of the ERP vendors and system integrators make use of the flawed practice of configuring and designing the software to handle hodgepodge of transactional workflows in the system. Despite the best practices, ERP manufacturing industry is lacking in its ability to institute, develop and manage business processes effectively as part of an implementation.    

 
Now the question is what is the approach which companies needs to follow to take business centric approach for its ERP system? Best practices which companies need to follow are:
 
1.      Define ERP business blueprint properly

Common practice which is favored by software vendors, system integrators and ERP consultants is to force implementing organization for the adoption of software by ignoring the “as is” processes and giving focus on the design of various transactions. This methodology is a flawed one and technology agnostic business blueprint is the perfect solution as provides the end to end workflows, organization responsibilities and well defined metrics which are required to drive business. Business blueprint approach lets you define how non-ERP processes and hand offs will be done and it also focus on implementation of the team’s attention on the elimination of non-value add activities and re-engineering of the broken business processes. You don’t need to adopt the traditional approach of simply adopting industry best practices as it can lead to critical issues. 
 

2.      Develop business case and benefits realization plan   

You cannot simply put your business processes within the organization without defining the metrics appropriately to drive those business processes. You also cannot realize the expected business benefits without proper benefits realization plan. Businesses which fail to create full business case and benefits realization plan also fail to realize the business benefits potential of new ERP systems. Your team needs a comprehensive plan in order to succeed and completely optimize the business benefits to outline how the organization will achieve the planned business benefits. 
 

3.      Create an effective organization change management plan

You need to define software and business processes to compete in the industry but you also need to manage the organizational change management component of an ERP implementation as it will determine whether the processes work or not and whether people will adopt the business processes or not. In addition to the training, an efficient organizational change management program will need to incorporate impact analysis, project branding, organization readiness and other key components as these are the components which will differentiate between an ERP failure and success.
 

4.      ERP Center of Excellence is a perfect way forward

Once an ERP implementation gets done you need to manage the operational misalignments in the processes. An effective and efficient COE focus on the required upgrades along with the steps which an organization needs to ensure that an ERP keeps up with the evolving business requirements and needs. COE will also enable you to identify the training needs, potential areas of organizations resistance and broken business processes which can be improved continuously through better use of an ERP software. Organizations and system integrators need to define the finish line of ERP implementations at go live time and they must also ensure a plan and a framework to improve the business processes and use of ERP.
 
These are the best practices which have delivered lots of successful ERP implementations and the projects without these best practices faced failures. Erpisto Retail ERP experts always try to follow the best practices to deliver the best implementations to the client’s right from the start till the end.