Based on our observations, there are three commonly used ways of installing ERP. The Big Bang—In this, the most ambitious and difficult of approaches to ERP implementation, companies cast off all their legacy systems at once and they install a single ERP system across the entire company. Though this method dominated early ERP implementations because…
At its simplest level, ERP is a set of best practices for performing the various duties in the departments of your company, including in finance, manufacturing and the warehouse. To get the most from the software, you have to get people inside your company to adopt the work methods outlined in the software. If the…
Although different companies will find different land mines in the budgeting process, those who have implemented ERP packages agree that certain costs are more commonly overlooked or underestimated than others. Armed with insights from across the business, ERP pros vote the following areas as most likely to result in budget overrun. Training—Training is the near-unanimous…
There aren’t any good numbers to predict ERP costs because the software installation has so many variables, such as: the number of divisions it will serve, the number of modules installed, the amount of integration that will be required with existing systems, the readiness of the company to change and the ambition of the project—if…
Before the checks are signed and the implementation begins, it’s critical for companies to figure out if their ways of doing business will fit within a standard ERP package. The most common reason that companies walk away from multimillion-dollar ERP projects is that they discover the software does not support one of their important business…
Integrate financial information—; As the CEO tries to understand the company’s overall performance, he may find many different versions of the truth. Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenue. ERP creates a…
No. It seems almost quaint to think of it today, but back in the days before Y2K, enterprise software vendors, and, more forcefully, the management consultants who installed the stuff, sold ERP as a magic bullet that companies could use to escape the coming Y2K apocalypse, create seamless technology integration across the company and force…
Companies that install ERP do not have an easy time of it. Don’t be fooled when ERP vendors tell you about a three- or six-month average implementation time. Those short (that’s right, six months is short) implementations all have a catch of one kind or another: The company was small, or the implementation was limited…
ERP’s best hope for demonstrating value is as a sort of battering ram for improving the way your company takes a customer order and processes that into an invoice and revenue—otherwise known as the order fulfillment process. That is why ERP is often referred to as back-office software. It doesn’t handle the up-front selling process…
Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, doesn’t live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn’t do much of that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP’s true ambition. The software attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can…