ERP Strategy after Go-Live

We have all seen lot of material available all over the internet in vendor white papers, research articles and independent blogs about the best practices on improving the ERP implementation cycle in terms of cost, cycle time and return on investment. Most of these articles stop at Go-Live and do not capture the challenges and the opportunities after Go-Live so that the envisaged benefits from ERP can be realized.

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If you ask me, I would say that Going Live successfully with the application is the first milestone in the whole business transformation exercise and we still need to not only measure and benchmark the process efficiencies as well as automation levels at fixed intervals to continuously improve them, but also make sure that the changes that have been brought in the organization as a result of the ERP Application Implementation, have gone down well with the users and they also see long terms benefits in switching to this new ERP, leaving behind their favorite legacy systems.

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I have tried to capture few challenges and opportunities that we stumble upon after Going Live with ERP that we all should consider so as to reap the benefits to the maximum. Let me first start with the challenges:

1. The first and foremost challenge after Going Live is to stop running parallel systems. While few organizations have really matured on this part and wither switch off the entire legacy systems or those functionalities in them that are now available in the new ERP and users are expected to work on them only in ERP, but still a very large number of organizations still do not have a well charted process in this regard. This poses multiple issues, the biggest being division of data in 2 or more applications and the very objective of having one source of truth is defeated.
2. Transition of Project Managers. While, all ERP projects have dedicated project managers who go well beyond the go-live to post production support period and make sure that the Live system is stable from bugs perspective before they off board, but often, role and responsibility clarity after that phase, dissolves and there are multiple owners (or shall I say Managers) and very less number of contributors that are needed to take it to the next level of change management, ongoing trainings, user access process, upgrade or enhancement decision processes etc.
3. Over dependence on support teams for knowledge management. It is often seen that after setting up a vendor team for providing post production support, organizations depend totally on their teams for preparing and updating the user manuals and other soft training material for users and new employees. Though they claim to review the documents before releasing to the business teams but I have my doubts on the review process. Again, not only the ERP documentation but defining the complete process of knowledge management for the process improvements using the application is a challenge.
4. Independent customizations in multi country rollouts. One of my friends, is working in an European company and they implemented ERP in 1999 and never upgraded after that. The implementation was done in 23 countries across the globe and finally when they thought of upgrading the ERP this year, they came to know that their ERP system is not a standard system any more. Every country has got done some or more country specific customizations in the ERP, making this a bunch of disparate systems that do not offer a standard process. The pain that they are going through now for upgrading the ERP is enormous and it has increased their costs multifold. The challenge here is to keep the standard system, standard enough so that future upgrades are done with minimum costs
5. ERP is not a magic wand. As soon as we go live with ERP we start expecting it to take over the organization and transform it to a world class organization. We want to be Best in Class as soon as possible, being done so much hard work during the implementation period. Keeping the expectations of business users to realistic levels is another challenge that needs to be addressed.

Likewise there are more Post Go-Live challenges that we all need to consider while making a strategy to realize maximum benefits from your ERP. I do not want to paint a gloomy picture by just highlighting the challenges here. It is not that you only have challenges after Go-Live and ours lives will revolve around them forever. Successful ERP implementation offers multiple opportunities to business beyond the expected benefits. Some of them are:

1. Standard and predictable process lets you plan future initiatives as well as further improve the process efficiencies
2. Improve the KPIs. Now that the as-is values of the KPIs are known to you, it is easier to make desired KPI model by benchmakring with the Best in Class and charting a roadmap to reach there
3. Rationalize the staff. It provides you with an opportunity to relook at the staffing levels and use them in more productive areas as automation will free up some staffing hours/days
4. Flank it with Best in Breed Systems. ERP might not be there in its present role for eternity. While ERP will give a standard platform and one source of truth, there are chances that it is not the best system in all areas. It might be the best transaction system (or financial reporting system) but still might need to be complimented with best in breed systems for niche areas like service parts planning, demand driven supply chain planning, procurement auctions or product lifecycle management for that matter. Having an ERP system tells you where you are currently and what do you still miss to reach the pinnacle of success

I have not captured the direct benefits that an ERP will provide to an organization but I understand that these opportunities sometimes look like the benefits (due to a thin line difference between them) only but believe me, you will still need to do some good amount of work to explore these as against the direct benefits that you will get after implementing ERP successfully. Essentially, the challenges are required to be part of our overall Benefit Realization Strategy from ERP and opportunities are the areas which show the way for reaping the by product benefits from ERP.