You know that your business needs an ERP, and that’s why ideally, you’re looking for ways to align your ERP implementation with your corporate/business strategy. According to research from Gartner[1]midsize enterprises often do not have a business strategy to which IT can align its application strategy of which ERP is one of the key applications. Therefore, CIOs must leverage their rapport with business executives to emphasise the importance of a clear business strategy and ideally contribute to it.
In this blog we’ll share some quick tips on how to create that synergy between IT and the business in this 2-minute read.
What areas does an ERP support?
An ERP is a central hub for looking after a company's finances, supply chain, ops, commerce & e-commerce, reporting, manufacturing, and HR. ERP software integrates all important processes across locations and departments. ERP captures real-time and accurate data across the organisation. It provides a single source of accurate data with complete transparency. It tracks the processes and provides insights and analysis based on the trends and history. This enables making informed, timely decisions. But as a significant capital investment, it’s important that your ERP is aligned to deliver against targets. But how do you do that?
Step 1: Identify quick wins
Many midsize enterprises either do not have a documented business strategy or it is not sufficient to inform the IT application strategy, yet IT leaders are responsible for digitalisation. It’s therefore critical to look at every department an ERP can touch. Where are the quick gains to be had? Focus on people, workflow, and processes, not technology. Take time to learn the pain points that are keeping your business from moving forward. Highlighting opportunities for improvement will allow you to identify targets and track progress.” You don’t have to stop at an internal view either. Look at the customer needs, supplier requirements and regulations that impact your business. Compare yourself to your competitors and see where you’re falling short. See how you could improve your business intelligence with your ERP implementation too. That’s an often-overlooked benefit. Your implementation partner can help you document what you’re doing now and the estimated benefits of each change.
Step 2: Determine value & vision
Actively support the process of creating or refining the business strategy by collaborating with C-suite members, business unit leaders and other stakeholders in the organisation[2].
When you look for quick wins, assign them a value in time saved, cost spared, customer retained or another core metric. Once you know what you’re going to measure to determine ROI, think about how rolling this out will look. Whether your organisation uses a big-bang, go-live-for-all-at-once approach, a phased rollout, a parallel adoption, or a hybrid implementation, keep in mind that no single ERP system implementation strategy works for every company or situation. Your ERP rollout partner can help you understand what type of implementation might work best for your environment, so your team quickly adapts to and begins to fully utilise your ERP investment.
Step 3: Rollout and optimise
Once you implement your ERP, you’re going to regularly evaluate it against your value metrics from step 2. Anything that’s working, you’ll celebrate and anything that needs adjustment you’ll tweak and measure again. Remember that every time you make a change, you’ll want to document the initial starting point so you can continue to track your progress. Once you’ve realised all the quick wins for one department or process you can repeat this process for the next department and so on.
Really to structure your ERP rollout. Our team of implementation experts are standing by to help you plan this journey.
[1] Midsize Enterprise Application Strategies, Part 1 — Identify the Business Strategy
Published 13 April 2021 - ID G00726690
[2] Midsize Enterprise Application Strategies, Part 1 — Identify the Business Strategy
Published 13 April 2021 - ID G00726690
How to align your ERP implementation with your corporate/business strategy