ERP Trend: Use of Social Media for Change Management

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The introduction and much increased popularity of social media in last few years has started opening multiple doors in different areas like just sharing your views on anything or using them for product promotion or other publicity or to garner support on a social cause etc. Another trend that has started picking up recently on the back of social media is the use of social media as real time collaborating tool for hardcore business purposes.

I intend to discuss one such use of social media specially twitter in this post that as per my view, has huge potential to handle change management while implementing ERP. Though I will be taking it up for change management during an ERP project but please note that this use can be extended to multiple business interactions for useful feedback, ideas and thoughts.

Typically, what all we want to do as part of change management? We want to:

• Make the users ready for the coming change in the way they do their daily business
• Take their feedback on the new add ons they expect from the new system
• Extract their concerns regarding the new system as well as any short sizing that might happen as a result
• Set their expectations
• Ensure that the transition is smooth
• Ensure that they are excited about the change
• Reduce the resistance to change
• Ensure their adequate training before the change takes place
• Highlight the real benefits of the new system for the organization and for the business users more importantly so that act as catalysts to change and not roadblocks to change
• Sharing tips on utilizing the new system in the best ways
• Share best practices on how they can benefit from the new system and improve their process efficiency or reduce manual work
• Ensure that customers and suppliers are in sync and they are ready for it
• Communicate to all stakeholders including business leaders, IT, super users and users, customers, suppliers, service provider, 3rd party system owners and others about the milestones of new system introduction

I understand that above list is not an exhaustive list but still includes a sizeable chunk of objectives that we want to achieve as part of our change management task as part of the ERP deployment. Almost all of the above points hover around effective communication and if we can get communication right, then more than half the job is done, in my opinion. Of-course, the content of the communication will play an important role but this post will focus on the other important part which is “mode of communication”.

One of the ideas that stuck my mind few months back, is that why not utilize twitter for the all important communication as part of the change management task during an ERP project and I bounced this off my regular professional group members during one of club parties. While most of them thought that twitter is yet to be evolved to that level before we use it that way and shared multiple concerns that they might face in using it – like their organizations might not allow using twitter in office, since we can not restrict users using twitter for non business purposes – we might lose on productivity and efficiency, the messages that can be sent using twitter are too short and conveying clear information is a challenge – the list is long. I was glad that 2 of the group members who incidentally were part of the same company somewhat showed tendency to buy this idea and requested me share the whole concept that is brewing in my mind. We met over drinks next time and came out with a strategy to use it in their organization that was going LIVE with their ERP in few months after one failed attempt due to multiple issues (change management being one as per them).

They kept working on the strategy and between more important issues, all of us moved to other topics in our further meetings – infact I could not attend the last couple of meetings due to health issues. To my surprise, I got a call from one of them yesterday that they went Live successfully with the new system and the twitter strategy was the shot in the arm for both of them as they introduced this to the organization and effectively utilized it for change management communication.

I was ecstatic (with the feeling…I told you so :-)) and could not wait for our next fortnightly meeting to get a complete download on the success story so we discussed the prelim part on phone. To summarize, their strategy was like this:

• Introduce twitter in the organization after requisite approvals
• Create a community dedicated to ERP project – They called it Pragati Communiqué, where Pragati means Progress
• Ensure that all stakeholders join this community as followers
• Restrict this community on web so that people can join by invitation only
• Create the communication capsules and the calendar
• Start sending short and crisp messages on the progress, benefits, changes etc. on the project
• Created polls, hosted them on their intranet and shared the URLs with the user population through twitter
• Sought ideas and other thoughts from users to create a feeling that everybody is taking part in implementing the new system and it is their system so a feeling of belongingness started creeping in among all users
• Also started pinging customers and suppliers with the milestones of project – though this part was not successful as these organizations did not allow twitter to be used in office
• Used it as real time chat window for sharing ideas, brainstorming and answering concerns

There were some other points that were mentioned to me but I am not able to recall now. I will surely post the complete strategy and the case study one I get the chance to meet them ion person in our next meeting.

The major factor of success for this strategy for them is that Twitter allows you to change your user name so if you do not want to be recognized after joining the community, while raising your concern – this is the best way to communicate but still remain anonymous. They encouraged users to remain anonymous while asking tricking questions so that nobody feels that there can be any sort of victimization after they go live.

Yes, they had their share of challenges too. It was not a cake walk for them to take approvals to introduce twitter for official use. Also, once they introduced it, they found people spending good amount of time in tweeting non business tweets but soon these died down and regular business took over – Yes, you are right, there are still some people who secretly use twitter for non business purpose.

Another challenge they had to conquer is that the management asked them to use email instead of twitter and it offers the same functionality with much more control on data security. The point made sense but as we know that most mails that come for “All employees” often are deleted without reading whereas twitter being a new thing in the organization made sure that everybody is glued to this waited for the updates to come or to respond to a query from a fellow user.

Overall, they were happy with the outcome. To me, this mark the beginning of a new era in communicating to a group of people with similar interests with social media and this surely will become a new trend to reckon with in coming years or shall I say months?

ERP Strategy: Increase your ROI from ERP

Most Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) purchase decisions are based on payback or Return on Investment (ROI)-based business cases. Business cases often use reduction in inventory and headcount as the primary ROI justifications. Since ERP software is also considered an infrastructure investment, it is natural to expect financial returns. Most organizations deploy ERP, and sit back to wait for returns. And when returns fail to come in, the ERP Strategy is regarded as a failure. It is important to understand that ROI comes from the process improvements supported by ERP—not from ERP software alone.

ROI does not come from ERP. ROI comes from what you do using ERP. ERP is a tool and it all depends on how well you use this tool. There are organizations that have got substantial benefits, which are many times their investment. And there are organizations that have not got the desired benefits. Realizing greater value from ERP systems is a matter of focusing attention on the effective use and alignment of people, process and technology. Additionally, I believe that today organizations are not able to quantify their ROI from ERP implementation because at the beginning of the project the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and measurement criteria were not defined; this makes it difficult to quantify the ROI at a later date. I divide the steps for getting the maximum ROI from your ERP in 3 broad categories which are Pre-Implementation Steps, During Implementation steps and Post implementation steps. Let me list down the steps under these categories, here:

Pre ERP Implementation:

• Identify the objective(s)
• Finalize the metrics or KPIs that are required to be improved upon ERP implementation
• Define their current value
• Audit the data quality of all key metrics and have a plan to improve it before you go live with new system
• Put in place the measurement system and method
• Freeze the targets for KPIs
• Identify the processes that impact those KPIs
• Make sure that the business initiatives are in place in these processes to achieve the identified KPIs
• Assess the organization's technical maturity level before project launch

During ERP Implementation:

• Stay focused on the KPIs improvement finalized in above steps
• Keep an eye on the cost and ensure no cost over-run as mentioned in my earlier post
• Go beyond basic project management and incorporate strategic alignment & tangible business improvement plans in addition of focusing on tasks & completion dates
• Use vendor resources wisely – use them only where you lack skills. For example, if you have excellent project managers, then use only the technical people from vendor
• Keep customizations to minimum
• Revisit KPIs and review them
• Plan change management strategy

Post ERP Implementation:

• Stop running parallel systems and the ERP should be the only source of truth
• Measure the KPIs only after 6 months of operations after Go-Live
• Keep on looking for improvement opportunities through benchmarking and assessment exercises
• Utilize ERP to the fullest as a tool for decision making and planning future initiatives
• Plan a strategy to counter post ERP challenges

These were some of the steps that will help organizations to improve their ROI from ERP. A more complete analysis of return can be made by looking at the overall payback that enterprise software can offer to a company. Enterprise software payback includes not only quantifiable improvements in bottom and top line functionality, but also more qualitative measures like new business opportunities, improved customer and partner relations, and improved time to market.

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Change Management - A major risk while deploying ERP

As seen in most of the failed ERP deployments across the world, one of the top10 reasons of failures is often failure to manage change. We all know that ERP deployment most of the times hit the comfort zones of users as they are used to work in one or other legacy applications and stopping it to learn a new system is always an effort. While some of them will have the motivation and the urge to learn something new, some are neutral and rest might be distracters for bringing the new system. Also, as most of the leading ERP systems enforce business discipline, compliance, transactional transparency and other regulatory activities, the increased work (initially) puts them off.

Well, what is change management? A common definition used for change management is a set of processes that is employed to ensure that significant changes are implemented in an orderly, controlled and systematic fashion to effect organizational change. One of the goals of change management is with regards to the human aspects of overcoming resistance to change in order for organizational members to buy into change and achieve the organization's goal of an orderly and effective transformation.

Change management has been developed over a period of time and one of the models that have played an influence in change management is the ADKAR model. ADKAR was a model developed by Prosci. In this model, there are five specific stages that must be realized in order for an organization or an individual to successfully change. They include:

• Awareness - An individual or organization must know why a specific change or series of changes are needed.
• Desire - Either the individual or organizational members must have the motivation and desire to participate in the called for change or changes.
• Knowledge - Knowing why one must change is not enough; an individual or organization must know how to change.
• Ability - Every individual and organization that truly wants to change must implement new skills and behaviors to make the necessary changes happen.
• Reinforcement - Individuals and organizations must be reinforced to sustain any changes making them the new behavior, if not; an individual or organization will probably revert back to their old behavior shortly and whole exercise will be a failure

It is not that we need to know and implement the above framework partly only to achieve the desired results; every point is very important and needs to be implemented with utmost sincerety. Having said this, we need to make sure that we do not sell change to people as a way of accelerating 'agreement' and implementation. 'Selling' change to people is not a sustainable strategy for success, unless your aim is to be bitten on the bum at some time in the future when you least expect it. When people listen to a management high-up 'selling' them a change, decent diligent folk will generally smile and appear to accede, but quietly to themselves, they're thinking, "No bloody chance mate, if you think I'm standing for that load of old bollocks you've another think coming…" (And that's just the amenable types - the other more recalcitrant types will be well on the way to making their own particular transition from gamekeepers to poachers.) Instead, change needs to be understood and managed in a way that people can cope effectively with it. Change can be unsettling, so the manager logically needs to be a settling influence.

In case we are able to manage change effectively, it acts as a major facilitator towards deployment of ERPs.