Organisations consider their ERP go-live as a huge milestone and the final step in their IT transformation. While going live on time and budget is a measure of success (also a significant milestone), it’s only one part of the ERP investment realisation puzzle.
The real success is if a business can always achieve operational efficiency – in other words, managing their application environment efficiently to keep it available and functional.
In this regard, two crucial aspects can lead the company forward:
- Stability – how efficiently can your CRM system, ERP solution and other critical business applications run? You should be maximising uptime
- Predictability – can you take preventative maintenance to mitigate downtime?
So, how you can ensure the stability and predictability of the ERP system? The key is the processes!
To standardise and sanitise your business operations, you must define and document all processes.
Most of the problems that arise immediately after an ERP go-live is due to a lack of understanding or clarity among users rather than a problem with the system. It’s this knowledge gap that will cost your organisation time, money, and most importantly, the unavailability of business-critical applications.
With business processes in place, you can achieve both technical and organisational continuity.
So, let’s take a look at three benefits of structured, coherent processes:
1. Improved operational efficiency
Structured and coherent services align a business around a single way to operate, resulting in improved operational efficiency. This minimises performance variance through documenting, analysing and enforcing processes.
Well-documented processes also help to mitigate the impact of unavailable resources. For example, if a certain team member is on annual leave or has left the company, you’ll know how to bridge that gap in resources.
2. Enhanced collaboration and decision making
Your employees, systems and applications can work in unison when your operations are stable and predictable. Structured processes will clearly outline operational guidelines. This will help your employees collaborate and make decisions quickly and easily. In addition to helping your workforce optimise their operations, well-documented processes reduce the training time of new members.
3. Better scalability and growth
When your processes are documented and well-structured, you can boost user adoption. This is because people will know what processes to follow, which reduces the likelihood of taking shortcuts or making steps up. It also allows continual and timely changes to be incorporated, enhancing organisational growth and scalability.
It’s all about control
ERP go-live doesn’t signal the end of your project. Go-live may be an important milestone but if you want to maximise the ROI of your investment and feel the full value of the new system, you must implement change in a controlled and documented manner.
It’s about continuing to support your users even after your ERP system has gone live. And that will only happen when you have your processes well-defined and documented.
On top of that, you’ll achieve the real success – operational efficiency.
The easiest way to achieve it?
It’s a lot of effort to achieve and sustain all of the above in-house. To maximise operational efficiency and handle all your business-as-usual tasks will require a large amount of resource from your IT team.
So why not outsource and work with a managed services partner who offers Application Management Services (AMS)? We’ve identified 4 core benefits to working with one here.
Ultimately, it’s more cost-efficient to outsource your efforts to reach operational efficiency and enables you to maximise the ROI on your technology investments.
To learn more about the role of efficient application maintenance and five tips to select the right AMS partner to help you support, download our latest tip sheet to grow your business!
