Mind the Gap! - Staying productive during your ERP transition period
ERP vendors are making a concerted effort to get their customers live faster. Using Agile techniques, a multi-phase approach, and scope management, vendors have reduced the time to "Go Live" significantly. Nonetheless, from the moment you decide to put your legacy ERP out to pasture to when you are up and running with your shiny new ERP can range from 8 months to a year and half or more.
Of course, during this transition period, you still have a business to run. Your staff still has all their regular tasks on their plate and now they have this large, enterprise project which requires their attention. A motivated team will tolerate running at 110% or even 120% work capacity during this period, but if you go higher than 120% you are getting into the "burnout" range which can have all kinds of negative effects.
How do you keep everyone energized and productive during this stressful time?
Above and beyond staff considerations, there is also the need to provide solid technology tools while you're waiting for the new ERP to be available.
How do you stay productive during this critical period? Here's some suggestions:
Call in the cavalry - There is an internal and external approach to balancing the workload. Internal is preferred, but is often not a viable option since the folks with excess capacity often do not have the right skill sets to take over responsibilities from the ERP team. As much as possible, offload tasks from the core ERP team to other team members.
This will often prove to be insufficient to account for the additional work. An external approach is to bring in contract workers, particularly a project manager. In some cases, you might not have anyone at the company who could take on the project manager role. Alternatively, you might have good candidates but they are too busy with other responsibilities.
A good contract project manager is worth their weight in gold. They can keep your implementation on time and on budget. It also creates a situation where you will have an opportunity to assess them for a year or more. It's a "try before you buy" situation. If you are happy with their work you can always offer them a full-time position since once your new ERP is live there are going to be an ongoing cascade of follow up projects - additional phases, new modules, integrations, upgrades, etc.
There's no friend like an old friend - If you've had an ongoing, friendly relationship with your incumbent ERP vendor, try to maintain it. You are going to need your vendor for at least another year for things like upgrades, reports, forms and general maintenance. They can also make life a lot easier for you if they help with data migration. Maintaining a friendly relationship with your incumbent vendor can make your life a lot easier and save you a lot of time.
The power of analytics - A great tool during your transition period is an analytics solution. There are some outstanding packages out there like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik. These solutions can allow you to continue to make progress with respect to reporting, analytics, and dashboards as you wait for your ERP to come online.
These analytics packages ship with hundreds of connectors, so they can pull data from virtually any system. An analytics package can enable multi-system reporting across all your systems. If you're using Quickbooks for finance, Salesforce for sales and marketing, Monday.com for operations, as well as sundry specialized Excel spreadsheets, you can pull data in from all of these systems and create visualizations, reports, and dashboards that will help with decision making, planning, and the customer experience.
I had one client that created heat maps in Power BI that helped their clients visualize the progress of their projects. The applications of these solutions are virtually endless. Plus, when you do go live with your ERP, an analytics package is a wonderful complementary solution.
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