ERP Success Tips: Link employee incentives with ERP success

As part of the Series on ERP Success Tips by InfoVerto, this time we are sharing another useful tip that will increase the chances of success of your ERP endeavor by many folds. This tip has resulted from the fact that lot of ERP programs these days are impacted by attrition of business team members and their inconsistent and uninterested participation. These business team members are part of the core team from business side for ERP solution deployment and their full fledged involvement and continuity is very important for the success of the program. Also, it is seen multiple times that business will lend only those resources for the ERP program that are either redundant or are close to redundancy to their present business function. They normally are not the best people from the business function which is a key need of an ERP program which without doubt is a strategic program for every organization. This is an issue that needs to be addressed and hence this tip.

Few companies may not see the link between the success of an initiative like ERP (or for that matter Lean or Six Sigma) with employee’s compensation but this is key component in motivating employees and is a sign of support from the executive leaders of the organization. This also sends out the signal that how important is this initiative for the organization and anybody involved in this and contributing to this, will have high visibility and growth path. Aligning compensation with performance is not a new idea but is has become a key component of the debate around excessive executive compensation. The need is to devise ways and means to compensate the ERP team members in such a way that they are:

• Motivated to join the team (infact we may see a competition between employees to join the team) and see that as an important opportunity of their career
• Keen to participate vigorously during the course of ERP program to their best of abilities
• Ready to ensure that the program is a big success and are excited to create a buzz about this in the organization
• Not digressed towards looking for a change of job midway of program as soon as they learn the intricacies
• Proud of being involved in one of the most important & visible initiatives of the organization

For all of this to achieve, it is important that the incentives that they will get as part of this program, are well distributed in such a way that they spend at least 6 months after the Solution Go Live, in the organization and spread the knowledge. There are deliverables and milestones that can be linked to their incentives and it can be made sure that one of the major concerns regarding ERP success can be mitigated pro-actively.

Tip: Use ERP and Business Intelligence to retain your customers

Running a business without consistently adding new customers is like a non performing employee who does not get further increments every year and is satisfied with the current level of salary. Sooner or later, that employee will get fired and the current salary will also become history. Similar fate will happen with the organization which is not focused on adding new customers as it directly implies that all is not well and slowly the existing customer base will also start eroding by moving towards competition. Even the vice versa is true, which means that if you are not able to retain your existing customers by a good margin (I know “good” has different meaning in different industries, but let us not go there) then getting new customers will also become a challenge especially in those industries where references play a major role.

I will focus on usage of ERP and Business Intelligence in retaining your customers instead of ways to get new customers and I am driven by the fact that every organization will do its best to increase the satisfaction level of their customers if they know that customers have this issue and as long as it is not hard hitting their balance-sheet. If, as a customer strategy leader I want to know that what is my on-time delivery rates for customers in Alaska or how much time did my organization took to resolve customer complaints for a digital device product, and my staff is taking its own time to dig this information, then it is high time that I start looking at this aspect now. It is ripe time now (rather you are late) to implement a 360 degrees view of your customers and start not only measuring but also have those measurements available real-time so that quick decisions can be made. Also, this will save the staff time in regularly digging information about customers and utilize that time in some other more value added work. This all can be achieved with the help of you existing ERP and BI system and a dashboard can be designed to show critical metrics for our organization. Most BI systems are very strong to deliver required data at our screens and the need to be configured to maximize the value of all data sources and achieve a better flexibility and customer responsiveness. We must combine strategic actions and new technology to:

• Integrate all your data source systems and bring them into a single dashboard
• Identify the customers that are “at risk” and put a process in place to do this regularly
• Enable customer support infrastructure to drill down to lowest transactional level details
• Proactively inform sales and service managers about potential issues in delivering a product or service
• Provide customer history on regular basis

In addition of helping us in maintaining customer satisfaction, lot of awkward situations can also be avoided by taking above actions. For example, take a case when a sales representative called an existing customer for renewing a soon to be expiring contract and as soon the formalities of renewing the contract were finalized, it was communicated from the credit department that the customer’s account has been sent to an external agency to collect payments due to long delinquency. If a 360 degrees view is available to staff, these mistakes can be avaoided.

Follow a simple rule that if we spend less time in digging information and spend more time in actually resolving the customer issues and even potential issues in near future, we will be more likely to retain/grow our existing customers, bring new customers and finally grow/expand our business.

SCM Strategy: Use Supply Chain Intelligence to improve operations

With global supply chains involving more suppliers, customers and intermediaries today than ever before, managing supply chain-wide information and knowledge effectively is becoming critical to business success.

If we need to improve the performance of supply chain, then first of all, we need to know where exactly we lack. World over, customers are getting more and more demanding and they now need faster and accurate fulfillment. To add to this, the demand is changing fast and organizations need to add capability to become flexible in responding to demand changes. On top of this, supply chain is increasingly becoming more and more complex due to globalization and there are much more KPIs coming into picture, to be controlled and improved so that the overall supply chain performance is improved.

Supply Chain Intelligence or Business Intelligence  for Supply Chain operations takes different forms and can be either operations focused (tactical)...