<img src="https://secure.leadforensics.com/133892.png" alt="" style="display:none;">

The Foundations of a Successful ERP Implementation

Columbus
Oct 12, 2022
Columbus
Home
  • Blog
  • The Foundations of a Successful ERP ...

Sometimes laying the right foundation is everything. That's why when the time comes to choose and implement an ERP solution for your business, the difference between whether you realize its full benefits or not often comes down to a single crucial word: preparation.

Done right, the transition to a modern, cloud-based ERP system can be transformative. Consolidating scattered and siloed data in a centralized repository that becomes a single source of truth is a giant step forward. When you combine that with the way that AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics can unlock previously hidden value in the data you have on hand, the payoffs have the potential to become exponential.

In fact, the right cloud ERP system can solve challenges in every stage of your business operations, from planning to production. It can help you compensate for the unexpected, root out hidden inefficiencies that are holding you back, and take full advantage of opportunities you otherwise might have missed.

Depending on the nature of your business, benefits may include:

  • Supply chain optimization
  • Better visibility
  • Smarter manufacturing processes
  • Better quality control
  • Lowered costs
  • More agile response to market conditions
  • The ability to detect anomalies and spot fraud
  • Reduced downtime
  • Better understanding of customer behavior
  • Improved customer retention

But getting to those benefits isn't as easy as just flipping a switch. First, look closely at three key elements:

  • Your goals
  • Your people
  • Your data

Your Goals: Set the Scene

Rather than jumping headlong into an implementation, it's important to evaluate your organizational goals, assess your needs and then think through the steps in advance.

In fact, most ERP implementations that fail do so for one reason: The businesses involved underestimated the time, resources and effort that were necessary for success.

Because your new ERP system will hopefully be part of your organization for years to come, it's in your interest to invest the time up front.

The good news is that with the right partners and expertise in place, it doesn't have to be prohibitively difficult. Modern ERP systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management are designed to integrate well with other systems, with faster processing thanks to the cloud, as well as greater mobile access and functionality. Reduced headaches in the form of stronger security and smoother updates are also good compensation.

 

Your People: A Vital Piece of the Puzzle

Adoption is essential.

So, one of the most important steps you can take is to consult and involve the stakeholders throughout your organization who will be impacted by the new system — because it won't succeed without their buy-in and enthusiasm. They need to see the new solution as an exciting set of tools that will empower them to work smarter, rather than an obstacle to be worked around.

Make sure users understand how the system will address their pain points and ultimately make their day easier and more rewarding. Help them see, for example, how being able to automate tasks that were previously done manually can free up time and focus for more important goals.

Getting to that place starts with listening to their needs and anxieties about migrating to new technology, so you're ready to answer those all-important "what's in it for me?" questions in a way that rings true and converts skeptics into believers.

When you design your transition around those answers and maximize the benefits users consider most important, it boosts credibility, acceptance and adoption, increasing the chances for success.

Your Data: The Heart of Your Business

Data needs to be at the heart of your planning.

After all, you can't base good business decisions on poor data. Data that's incomplete, inconsistent or inaccessible can cause hiccups and halts, and depending on what legacy systems and silos your data currently resides in, it may take some time and ingenuity to get it ready for the journey to its new home.

One of the most important steps in the transition will be making sure your data is in good shape. Don't assume it's ready to just pour into the new system: You may need to do some important excavation and cleanup work, and build a healthy allowance of time for data wrangling into the process.

Handling the data journey with appropriate planning and care will position you to get the best possible outcome. A trusted partner can help you do this.

 

An 8-Step Process to Kick Off a Successful ERP Implementation

When you're ready to start your journey, follow these steps to ensuring you pick the right solution and partner for your business:

Step 1: Create Your Plan

What do you hope to accomplish by upgrading your ERP? Whether your answers involve reducing costs, improving data management, boosting security, growing your business, or fostering innovation, or all of the above, they'll help guide your selection process toward a better fit for your needs.

Step: 2: Build Your Team

Recruit the team that will evaluate ERP candidates. Make sure to include stakeholders from across your organization — from management to line workers, sales, marketing, HR, accounting, etc. — so you have representation from every corner of your business that needs to be invested in the success of the project.

Step 3: Map Out Your Processes

Consider the full range of your operations to assess what's working well, and where you see inefficiencies that can be addressed by a modern ERP system. This, too, will provide useful insights when it comes time to choose your solution.

Step 4: Enlist a Seasoned External Resource

At this stage of the journey, outside expertise can make a world of difference. Having an external team like Columbus in your corner who can draw on a deep well of experience and lessons learned from hundreds of previous ERP implementations, as well as familiarity with the full range of available options, will help you avoid pitfalls and zero in on the best approach for your needs.

Step 5: Create Your Timeline and Budget

At this stage of the planning, you'll ideally be working hand in hand with your internal team as well as your external experts to arrive at a reasonable timeline as well as realistic cost expectations. How fast can you move — and is it better to implement all at once or embrace a phased approach, where you strengthen your foundation first and then invest in technology to enhance your process as you go?

Step 6: Identify an ERP Partner with Industry-Specific Experience

It's important to be on the same cultural wavelength as your ERP partner, and industry experience matters, as well. So, as you connect with potential partners, be sure to talk through your unique industry requirements to make sure they understand those needs. Consider developing a checklist or scoring system to track the differences between potential vendors and evaluate how well they fit with your organization.

Step 7: Learn from Others

It's helpful to talk with other clients of your leading vendor candidates, and also talk with others in your industry to learn from their experiences in this realm. Finding out about their stumbles and successes will provide important learning to help you make better choices. Have your vendors provide a demo, and don't be shy about asking questions.

Step 8: Make Your Selection

By the time you've completed the steps outlined above, you should be ready to choose the right ERP solution in a way that's informed by your company's goals, the needs of your internal stakeholders, and the expertise of others who have walked the path ahead of you.

 

Columbus has worked with hundreds of companies to manage ERP implementations with varying degrees of scale and complexity, so we know this process and this journey well. Over the decades we've learned that one size doesn't fit all — and putting in the necessarily diligence at the beginning, middle and end of the process to arrive at the best possible fit pays the best dividends over the long haul.

Want to learn more about how Columbus can help you select and implement the right ERP solution for your business? Get in touch with us today.
Topics
Columbus

Columbus

Columbus is a global IT services and consulting company with more than 1,600 employees serving 1,100 customers worldwide. Columbus helps ambitious companies transform, maximize, and future-proof their business digitally. We are specialized within the industries retail, distribution, food, and manufacturing. We offer a comprehensive solution portfolio with deep industry knowledge, extensive technology expertise and profound customer insights

Find me on:

Discuss this post

Recommended posts

Convert Knowledge into Action with AI-Powered Data Tools

Columbus

Achieving a deeper understanding of the information that's already available to you can trigger major breakthroughs for your business, helping you exceed your goals and propelling you toward opportunities that you might not have even considered. The key to those breakthroughs is figuring out how to unlock the hidden insights in your data. That can seem like a daunting task, given the truly dizzying amounts of data available to businesses in the Industry 4.0 era — especially if they're getting real-time data from thousands of IoT devices. Connecting the dots isn't so hard when you've got a small and manageable set of dots to connect. But as the number of data points increases, the possible connections between them grow exponentially, and it takes a lot of computing power to precisely map all those connections and surface the important patterns and trends. That's part of why the neural networks that power AI and machine learning are so transformative. They make it possible to cut through the noise and detect patterns that would otherwise get missed. How AI Provides Superior Insights You might also think of AI as functioning a bit like a pair of 3D glasses: It helps you see things that would be unclear without it. By using Microsoft's Power BI dashboards, for example, you can draw on the power of AI to monitor your data, surface the important metrics, and then tell the story through powerful and easy-to-understand visualizations. These robust data dashboards can help you do everything from detecting security breaches to figuring out which products are most successfully driving your revenue. Boosting Sales with Better Product Pairings Some product pairings are obvious: syrup with pancakes, or paintbrushes with cans of paint. But others are more subtle and may not be apparent without the powerful combination of a strong foundational set of data and AI-powered analytics, which can help identify those less obvious complementary sales products. For instance, using AI can highlight that when you position product A alongside product B, you can experience a substantial boost of 5% in sales—a significant advantage for your business. How Machine Learning Helps Stop the Churning Spotting and addressing customer churn is another great example of what machine learning can do. It costs more to acquire new customers than to hold on to the ones you have, so the ability to use analytics to detect customers who are drifting way, or at risk of being captured by your competitors, is potentially game-changing. Using predictive analytics, you can reach out to those customers whose interest is waning with well-timed discounts and promotions, or even develop subscription-based models or loyalty programs to help keep them in the fold. Defeating Downtime with Predictive Insights We frequently see manufacturing facilities that are depending on one or two mission-critical machines that do 80% of their business — and those machines are often running 24/7. If one of those machines goes down, the result is painful downtime that can lead to production delays, revenue losses, and unhappy customers. Both your bottom line and your top line wind up taking a hit. But thanks to machine learning and IoT sensors, you can draw on real-time data to identify equipment that may be getting too hot, going out of tolerance, or at risk of developing other kinds of diagnosable hiccups and coughs. And then you can step in to make sure those sine qua non machines continue to function on schedule, protecting your balance sheet and keeping your customers happy. Data That's More Than a Fair-Weather Friend MRP is another place where predictive analytics can help put you ahead of the game. Maybe you're using a kind of "brute force" accounting to decide how to allocate costs among ten different product lines — 20% here, 5 percent there, etc. But with predictive analytics, you can get more sophisticated. You can identify trends like seasonality and other less-apparent cycles, so you can change allocations dynamically to match trends you wouldn't have otherwise known about. Machine learning allows you to factor in a lot of external data that goes beyond what's in your own ERP. Like weather data, for example. Suppose you have a product line that's very sensitive to heat or humidity. You might be able to draw on weather data to augment your existing data, so you can change the chemical properties of the product to make it more humidity resistant. Columbus recently worked with a retail organization that sells high-end outdoor products as a major component of their business. They found that some sizes and products sold better in certain stores than others, and they wanted a better understanding of the optimal product mix in each store. That's the kind of complicated data picture that machine learning can help you bring into focus. One of the other key questions they needed to answer was weather-related: when to bring out the heavier gear, like winter gloves or insulated vests and jackets. So, the ability to analyze weather trends and patterns offered an opportunity to achieve better timing and improve their margins. There are plenty of other ways that the capabilities of AI can help you make it rain — or provide an umbrella to get you through downturns and disruptions. To learn more, schedule a call with Columbus so we can help your organization tap into the full capabilities of AI.

Key Considerations for Successful AI Implementation in ERP

Columbus

As we begin 2024, it's no longer a question of whether to adopt AI-driven tools and strategies. These days, forward-thinking business leaders are actively considering how to adopt and implement AI successfully, in order to minimize risks and maximize the strategic rewards.

Unlock the Power of AI and ERP for Business Success

Columbus

Some of the most exciting capabilities of current ERP systems — the ones with the potential to put ambitious new business goals within your reach — are the ones that leverage the impressive recent advances in artificial intelligence. Experienced leaders know that to reap the rewards of new technology, you need to be clear-eyed and fully aware of the potential rewards and opportunities, as well as the pitfalls that need to be avoided. What do you need to know to take full advantage of the fusion of ERP and AI, without running into unexpected obstacles and dangers? Ultimately, there's no substitute for careful planning, forethought, and guidance from ERP experts. How Do ERP and AI Work Together to Benefit Business? One of the most important ways that AI boosts the capabilities of ERP systems is by helping companies recognize patterns and make predictions. With AI-powered ERP software, you can forecast everything from sales and cashflow to supply chain disruptions and the need for preventive maintenance of equipment. This pattern detection plays out in all kinds of valuable ways. With visibility into open purchase orders, for instance, AI can spot when a supplier with multiple orders is late with one of them, assess the implications for the other orders, and call that to your attention so you can communicate with the supplier as needed. You may be able to resolve the situation easily with a two-minute email, where previously it might not have come to your attention until it was too late. It's especially helpful to have AI monitoring things like potential shipping disruptions. Whether it's a ship blocking the Suez Canal or ports closing due to the outbreak of war, it can make a huge difference to have a system that keeps track of shipping details and alerts you to possible delays an extra day—or even an extra week—in advance. How AI Boosts Workplace Productivity Another of AI’s real superpowers is its ability to help team members spend less time on tedious drudge work and more time on higher-level tasks. AI is tremendously effective at bypassing writer's block, for example. It can expedite critical tasks like summarizing business meetings, generating sales or purchase agreements, and writing business correspondence along with other business documents. Consider the new Microsoft Copilot, which is integrated with Dynamics 365. It combines the power of language models with your business data—including all your Microsoft 365 apps, documents, and conversations. It can help you: • Write documents in Word by generating text and suggesting edits • Analyze and visualize data quickly in Excel • Bring ideas to life impactfully in PowerPoint • Create efficient communications in Outlook … and much more. How AI Helps Elevate Customer Service AI can take customer service to a higher level by helping customers get the information and help they need in a timelier manner. It can also ensure that customers get their deliveries faster by solving or preventing supply chain and logistics issues. Automatic certain customer service tasks with AI means less waiting and happier customers. What Key Trends Are Driving the Adoption of AI in ERP systems? One of the most potent factors fueling interest in AI right now is the success of tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly. These tools have democratized AI by making it widely accessible in an easy-to-use format. In just the last couple years, the average person’s eyes have really been opened to AI’s possibilities. But contrary to what most people think, AI didn't just burst on the scene overnight— it’s been under the hood of many business software programs for years, slowly developing its capabilities and enabling more sophisticated tools. Microsoft in particular has been at the forefront of this. Remember Clippy in MS Office? That was an early example of an AI-powered assistant. Cortana was another step along the path. ERPs have been drawing on the power of AI for years now to analyze patterns and trends and make better forecasts and predictions. Microsoft's Dynamics 365 has been a leader in this effort as well. These days, Microsoft's Power Apps are a great example of how Microsoft helps companies harness the power of AI to boost and extend their abilities. With Power Automate, for example, you can easily make use of robotic process automation (RPA) and digital process automation (DPA) to automate recurring tasks and create automated workflows using low-code drag and drop tools. With Power Automate, you can even explain a problem in English and have it create a solution for you. So instead of needing to know how to write a SQL query, you can just say something like, “Hey, I want a list of all customers that spent at least $100,000 worth of product from us in the past, including something from this particular product line, but haven't bought from us in the last six months" — and Power Automate will know how to build that query and then either display it in a Power BI view, use it to feed a mass mailing, or do other useful things with it. Which makes it possible to get what you need out of systems without having to understand all the bits and bytes involved. Likewise, the power of predictive analytics, and the machine learning and forecasting tools that are built into ERPs like D365, mean you don't need to be a data scientist to analyze and visualize data in new and powerful ways — helping you see the road ahead so that you can run your business in a proactive (rather than reactive) way. Setting Guardrails: Navigating Potential Risks With power comes responsibility, of course, and a need to be clear-eyed about the possible downsides and pitfalls of leveraging AI within an ERP system. Navigating these issues successfully comes down to making sure you have the right guardrails in place and that they aren't circumvented. One of the most critical issues is to make sure that your data is tagged correctly by setting up good IT governance. What data should only be used within the walls of the company? What should be limited to people with specific levels of access? For example, consider a publicly traded company. If their financial results are inadvertently released before their 10-K is published, the SEC could punish them for it. AI could accidentally leak that kind of data if the right guardrails aren't in place to prevent it. Making sure data is correctly tagged can be a complicated process, and a lot of companies, especially smaller ones, may not have the necessary skills in house. That's an area where a partner like Columbus can step in and help. Copyright and intellectual property is another area where strong guardrails need to be set up. The Writer's Guild strike recently drew attention to this issue. For businesses, the question is: How do you make sure that your data and intellectual property aren't appropriated and leveraged without your permission? This is another reason why data needs to be carefully tagged and protected before it's released. There's a major change management component to this issue as well. It's vital to make sure that employees are aware of the risks and understand the proper procedures to safeguard data, as well as which tools are appropriate to use and which aren't. Policies also need to be created to make sure that employees don't circumvent the guardrails, intentionally or unintentionally. Making sure team members are trained in a consistent and ongoing way is crucial. How Can Enterprise Businesses Prepare for a Future Shaped by AI and ERP? With all of the above in mind, you can’t let the risks of new technology dissuade you from moving forward. Your competitors will be taking advantage of these tools, and you can't afford to be left behind. The key is to implement these tools in a disciplined and measured way, staying cognizant of the rewards and possibilities, as well as the potential pitfalls. This is another area where having an experienced partner like Columbus by your side can help you steer the ship successfully. Want to learn more about how Columbus can help your organization harness the full capabilities of AI? Get in touch with us today.

How to Develop Your Digital Platform and Business Together

Columbus

Right now, companies in the food and beverage industry have a lot on their plate. A key question how to meet all demands and at the same time reach all your business goals? Unifying your technology platform, business strategy and operations is necessary to stay ahead of your competitors. Companies have to keep up with increasing consumer demand for products that are healthy, ethical and environmentally friendly while at the same time meeting regulatory standards and minimizing food waste. And, of course, they still have to do the usual work of keeping margins high, preparing for emergencies, ensuring product quality, staying innovative and minimizing risk at every stage of production.

The Food and Beverage Industry: Create Value Together Going to the Cloud

Columbus

Like other industries, food & and beverage companies must initiate strategy planning and change management at the very start of bringing their business systems to the cloud. That’s the best way to avoid additional costs, effort, and business interruption. And the trick is to define value with a people mindset.
right-arrow share search phone phone-filled menu filter envelope envelope-filled close checkmark caret-down arrow-up arrow-right arrow-left arrow-down