Investing in ERP has the potential to turbo-charge your business and ensure the smooth running of daily operations. You might have spent weeks or months debating between which type of ERP to purchase, but implementation is where you can make or break your ERP initiative. Here are seven common mistakes that you want to avoid, so that you can successfully integrate your ERP system into your business operations.
1. Ineffective Project Planning
Our first point is perhaps the most crucial. ERP is a complex process, and you need to understand how the implementation will work. If you fail to prepare, you’re preparing to fail. You need to have a project plan to get the most from your ERP. Without this baseline, your ERP will not serve the purpose your business requires.
2. Neglecting to Gather Requirements
The purpose of ERP is to make your business operations more effective. You want to go beyond just automating your current processes and take a critical look at your operations while identifying specific issues and room for growth. If your business doesn’t have measurable goals in place to test the effectiveness of the ERP, your experiment will fail.
3. Excluding Critical Users from The Process
Make sure all departments and employees are involved in the new ERP implementation process. All employees will be affected by the system and could offer insights you haven’t thought of.
There is a human element to your ERP you need to consider. Employees who will be working with the ERP system on a daily basis need to be fully trained to use the system correctly. Consider a formal training process with an attached “Questions and Concerns” meeting to address how your employees feel about the new system before launch.
4. Forgetting to Prioritize User Experience
You want your ERP to utilized as much as possible, otherwise, why bother getting an ERP? If the user experience of your system is challenging, your employees won’t want to use it. With the seamless user experience of smartphones, tablets, and computers, if an ERP system is confusing, hard to learn, and hard to use, employees will get frustrated and annoyed.
5. Not Considering Having an Industry Specific Solution
When you’re personalizing your ERP, you want to bring in industry-specific features more mainstream and traditional manufacturing companies might overlook. Shop around for your software provider and see if any specialists in your niche provide custom-tailored solutions.
6. Not Providing Sufficient Internal Support
If you want your ERP to be successful, you need your employees to use it and buy into the software. While some people might take to the ERP like second nature, other employees may struggle with change. Ensure your management team is providing employees with ongoing support throughout the process. It’s a good idea to nominate someone to be the driving force behind your ERP implementation, someone who employees can turn to if they have questions.
7. Neglecting Change Management
As you use your ERP, there’s going to time when changes need to be made. If you’ve just reached a nearly optimal process using the software, you might be resistant to change. Continuous improvement should be a focal point in the early stages of ERP implementation. Don’t get stuck saying “good enough.”
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