Your ERP go-live is a huge milestone and major victory, but it's by no means the final step in your ERP investment journey.
While going live on-time and on-budget is a measure of success, it’s just one part of the ERP realization puzzle—not the finish line.
A better measure of your investment’s success is post-implementation operational efficiency and application environment efficiency. Stability in CRM, ERP, critical business applications and predictability can propel your business forward.
So, how can you ensure stability and predictability? The key is processes! To standardize the operations of a business, its important to define and document all the processes.
Immediately after go-live, about 80% of problems arise out of lack of understanding or clarity among the user groups rather than a problem with the system. This gap costs the organization time, money and most importantly the availability of mission-critical applications.
With processes in place, you can ensure both technical continuity and organizational continuity.
Here are some of the benefits of a successful ERP go-live:
- Improved operational efficiency: Structured and coherent services streamline operations for improved efficiency. It minimizes performance variance through documenting, analyzing and enforcing processes. Well-documented processes also reduce the risk of key talent being unavailable.
- Enhanced collaboration & decision-making: Stable and predictable operations enable your employees, machines and relationships to work in unison. Processes extend clear guidelines for operations making it easier for people to collaborate—which in turn helps you make quick decisions. In addition to helping the existing workforce optimize their operations, well-documented processes reduce the training time of incoming team members.
- Better scalability and growth: Documented and structured services help productive, immediate user adoption, which allows a greater scope for growth and scalability. It also permits continual and timely changes to be incorporated leaving room for organizational improvement.
Businesses are faced with both cross-market and traditional competitors every day, thanks to the extensibility of technology. Getting ahead and staying ahead requires realizing your investment and nurturing your ability take advantage of business opportunities.
That's why we created ColumbusCare Application Management Services (AMS). It’s a value delivery system covering reactive support services, proactive managed services and as-needed consultancy services. ColumbusCare AMS provides life cycle solutions for a customer's complete business applications platform. With a dedicated team of industry, technical and functional consultants, ColumbusCare AMS provides standardized building blocks that can be combined and customized depending on your business needs.
ColumbusCare AMS includes a wide range of applications tailored to your business needs:
- Transition Management – Transition from development to production
- Application Support – Establish application support so your users get the help they need
- Problem Management – Root cause analysis to resolve repeat issues
- Change Management – Capture, prepare and implement change
- Release Management – Put changes into production in a controlled, agile and planned way, that doesn’t disturb users
- Application Uptime – Perform monitoring and event management in a proactive manner for a guaranteed uptime
- Access Management – Ensure accurate company-wide access for all employees
- Automated Quality Assurance – Maintain quality in a cost-efficient way
Once you go-live, AMS ensures stability in your system via best practices and upgrades. Your pain points are prioritized and resolved effectively by an advanced risk mitigation process. And by standardizing processes, your business evolves in accordance to your needs.
Every day you need to ensure that you can implement change and release management and/or support your users after you’ve gone live. This can happen when you have your processes well defined and documented.
To learn more about the best way to achieve operational efficiency, check out our latest eBook, fundamental principles of application management services.
