Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Sustain2green
"MOTHER NATURE does not do bailouts" - Al Gore. Sustainability, Green Initiatives and Green Supply Chain. Triple bottom line: Social, Economic, Environmental.Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR). "Political"?. http://www.sustain2green.com/
Sunday, March 29, 2009
ERP Implementation
PRISMA ………………. Prism for ur vision & ideas Monday morning in M/s Prism Inc is very busy day for the MIS team, marketing team and sales team. They publish their turnover data for the previous week to their management for performance reporting. Mr CIO of Prism is very busy trying to push his battery of data entry operators [ other wise designated as MIS managers ] to get the Sales data collated for the week. The team is struggling to put the data into a standard template as preferred by the Mr CEO since the data have to received by them from all corners of the market in a multiple formats with non-standard product description. The non standard data is an accepted reality in the organization. The Sales force have been given complete flexibility in terms of data collection. The Marketing Head and CEO both feel that this a favor that these guys are doing to the organization. Because their prime job is to do selling in the market place and not data collation. While, Mr CIO is dire hurry to get the weekly sales report for the marketing director and stressfully sitting in his office, gets a service call from a vendor. He promptly shouted back to the vendor in a very dismal mood and said “ Don’t you know that today is Monday. I have no time to take your call early morning and waste my time.” Reply from the vendor “ I know Sir, today is monday …but couldn’t understand what so special about the day?” Mr CIO said “ It is our sales report day. You SME vendors will understand all these. We report sales for the week to the management board on this day every week” Vendor replied with a surprise “ But Sir, we do it every hour, everyday! From our system data flows automatically to us with every invoice that we raise”. Mr CIO with great surprise disconnected the phone but keep wondering “ How is that possible!” During the sales review meeting with board members, CEO broached the topic of everyday sales report review in view of growing competitiveness in the market place and with increase in number of product ranges and its variants. The immediate reaction of the Marketing director is like “ how that is possible?” He reacted by saying “ Do you expect boys to sit back in office and collate sales numbers instead of pushing sales in the market place?” CEO looked at CIO and asked “ Can IT do something in this area ?” Mr CIO remembered what his vendor told him in morning about tracking of sales data every hour, responded by saying “ I think the same could be done by doing ERP system implementation. Somebody in our vendor organization was mentioning that they track in the system almost on hourly basis”. Mr CEO said “ But we also get our sales data from the system. Then in that case the same should be possible in our organization also”. Mr CIOreplied in confused manner “ But we have our systems which are all localized at the sales offices spread across various locations and they are not integrated. Hence, we get the data from each of the sales offices and collate the sales data centrally in the MIS department for weekly review. The entire activity requires atleast one full working day for data to get collated at the Head Office for Sales Reporting. On-line data capture and reporting requires implementation of ERP system for the entire enterprise.” CEO immediately said “Then lets go for it”. Mr CFO replied “ But this is a very expensive proposition. ERP implantation is very resource intensive and returns on that investment may not come that thick and fast”. CEO said “ Lets have a full fledged board meeting on the same immediately to have some detailed level of understanding ”. On the next day Mr CIO prepared a detailed level presentation covering various aspects of ERP system, its deliverables and benefits to the organization. But the board members seem to be not very convinced with the fact that the unique business practice and processes could be easily put into the system easily which are currently being done by their high skilled and trained resources of the organization. Further, all of them are very concerned as to how suddenly the age old work practices could be changed overnight for which the organization had spend fortune for training and development of their resources. On hearing such apprehensions, CEO requested to each of the board member to put down their expectation from the proposed ERP system in order to engage some implementation consultant who have good experience in such implementation and have better understanding of the industry best practices. The exact from the minutes of the meeting of the board held are …………… Marketing Director expects that sales data to be made available in the system with every invoicing done in the sales office across all markets and location. The data must be available on real-time basis. Finance Directors expects a very ROI from this investment in qualitative terms Supply Chain Director expects that system will be able to help the business to optimize the inventory holding and do the demand servicing on least cost basis Technical Director expects system to improve upon the Good Manufacturing Practices and measure production efficiency CIO expects the system should enable to drive ‘ single version of truth’ in terms of data and reports CEO (Intersting Website: http://www.toomuchfrustoo.blogspot.com/) expects the system to be a ‘decision support’ and ‘decision enabler‘. As per instruction of CEO, all these expectations are collated and CIO briefed all potential ERP consultant for proposal. Almost, all reputed consulting firms are invited for their presentation to the Board on the proposal. Everybody has impressed that all the stated expectations and objective will be delivered but everybody has left the board with some after thoughts by using some terms like Business Process definition, Change management, Change agent, Project Governance and Role definition, Enterprise scope definition, User classifications, training etc. The entire Board suddenly started realizing that onus of such ERP system implementation of more them rather than on the consultants. Now, the entire board is grappling with these terminologies and trying to decipher more appropriate meaning in context to their own business. Realization has started dawning on them that ERP implementation success lies more on the business rather than on the quality of consulting firm. The debate and deliberation is still on since no consultant can provide input to your business since YOU KNOW THE BEST………………….. Come, let’s see whether we can provide you with any cues and pointer to sharpen your own thought processes, so that you have a better clarity and understanding about of all these buzz words and terminologies which are frequently used by your consultants. We shall try to walk you through our library of experiences which we have gathered in a very hard way in the past. You share your pain points and we shall try to apply our experiential learning on to it to make your journey more pleasant and smooth. Promise is not the moon or starts it is very hard-core ground level realities which people tend to overlook during such grand finale.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Who is the best consultant ?
It is a very important day for Mr CIO of M/s Prisma Inc. Senior Team from a top ERP consulting team is going to make a presentation to the Board. Mr CIO had already forwarded the Board members’ expectations to the consulting firm.
During the presentation, the firm highlighted all their capabilities, competencies, experience and band width of ERP implementation. Some successful implementation stories were also narrated alongwith the video clippings of CIO,CEO & CFO’s of various organization sharing their experience and benefits of ERP implementation in their organization.
The entire board room is filled with lots of excitement and satisfaction. There is a sense of great relief and containment on the face of all key stake holders with a hope that if this firm is appointed, all their pain points will get resolved on a ‘press of a button’. Now, the consultants have already done a positive sales peach in the organization. On realization of the same, the head of the consulting team proposed to the board that they would like to take the board members through the implementation plan. All the board members without even realizing what has hit them, overwhelmed board members instantaneously agreed to go through the plan.
In the plan presentation, the consultant has listed out the detailed steps for implementation. Wherein, there is mention of broadly four steps :-
· Preparation
· Process mapping
· Configuration
· Go_live
Then they started emphasizing on the critical success factors. The stated pre-conditions to any successful implementation are :-
· Governance model with detailed role and responsibilities of Project Sponsor, Program Manager, Project Manager etc.
· Project execution structure and involvement of resources like Process Owner, Module lead, Module team etc.
· Project implementation structure and roles and responsibilities of Super user, Training manager, end user etc.
Looking at the requirement and involvement of the various resources at the various levels of the organization CEO responded by saying “ Who will then run the business? If, this is the level of involvement of people in the organization then what will be the role of consultant in this entire process of implementation.”
The head of consultant replied by saying “ Unless you involve your entire organization then how will you bring about change management across the landscape of the organization. The value that we will bring on board is only about the implementation experience and ERP knowledge expertise. But the you and your people know your business best and you have to take the ownership of getting it right at the time implementation.”
Mr CIO added by saying “ But you are also bring the industry specific best practices also I suppose “. The head of consulting explained that every organization believe that their business practice and process is the best and that is preciously the reason why the business is thriving. He further, mentioned that there is no standard industry specific template or formula per say that can be applied across various enterprise in the industry space to get a ‘one size- fit- all’ solutions.
Mr CIO asked the head of consultant “Who is the best consultant”? He immediately replied “You and your team, sir. Since, you know your own business best. That knowledge repository cannot be replicated by any consulting house in this world. With our multi project bandwidth we can only do benchmarking and validation and provide some input for some functional correction.”
Mr CEO asked “ What for we are engaging you”? The consultant head replied “ It’s only for our knowledge in the ERP product functionality and for our bandwidth in such implementation across various industry vertical. In fact we are enabling you to unleash and realize potential value of your business better and bigger”………….
During the presentation, the firm highlighted all their capabilities, competencies, experience and band width of ERP implementation. Some successful implementation stories were also narrated alongwith the video clippings of CIO,CEO & CFO’s of various organization sharing their experience and benefits of ERP implementation in their organization.
The entire board room is filled with lots of excitement and satisfaction. There is a sense of great relief and containment on the face of all key stake holders with a hope that if this firm is appointed, all their pain points will get resolved on a ‘press of a button’. Now, the consultants have already done a positive sales peach in the organization. On realization of the same, the head of the consulting team proposed to the board that they would like to take the board members through the implementation plan. All the board members without even realizing what has hit them, overwhelmed board members instantaneously agreed to go through the plan.
In the plan presentation, the consultant has listed out the detailed steps for implementation. Wherein, there is mention of broadly four steps :-
· Preparation
· Process mapping
· Configuration
· Go_live
Then they started emphasizing on the critical success factors. The stated pre-conditions to any successful implementation are :-
· Governance model with detailed role and responsibilities of Project Sponsor, Program Manager, Project Manager etc.
· Project execution structure and involvement of resources like Process Owner, Module lead, Module team etc.
· Project implementation structure and roles and responsibilities of Super user, Training manager, end user etc.
Looking at the requirement and involvement of the various resources at the various levels of the organization CEO responded by saying “ Who will then run the business? If, this is the level of involvement of people in the organization then what will be the role of consultant in this entire process of implementation.”
The head of consultant replied by saying “ Unless you involve your entire organization then how will you bring about change management across the landscape of the organization. The value that we will bring on board is only about the implementation experience and ERP knowledge expertise. But the you and your people know your business best and you have to take the ownership of getting it right at the time implementation.”
Mr CIO added by saying “ But you are also bring the industry specific best practices also I suppose “. The head of consulting explained that every organization believe that their business practice and process is the best and that is preciously the reason why the business is thriving. He further, mentioned that there is no standard industry specific template or formula per say that can be applied across various enterprise in the industry space to get a ‘one size- fit- all’ solutions.
Mr CIO asked the head of consultant “Who is the best consultant”? He immediately replied “You and your team, sir. Since, you know your own business best. That knowledge repository cannot be replicated by any consulting house in this world. With our multi project bandwidth we can only do benchmarking and validation and provide some input for some functional correction.”
Mr CEO asked “ What for we are engaging you”? The consultant head replied “ It’s only for our knowledge in the ERP product functionality and for our bandwidth in such implementation across various industry vertical. In fact we are enabling you to unleash and realize potential value of your business better and bigger”………….
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Crafting the mySAP
The ERP solution vision must address the following: -
How an enterprise solution will better enable the core business to be successful
Identify the shortcomings of the systems and processes in place today.
For example, is it difficult, expensive or cumbersome to customize the system? Are employees forced to duplicate entries in multiple systems?
Clearly define the value that you believe those system should provide to the business. Should it tie together different functional and business areas or enable real-time decision-making?
Refine and document the characteristics and capabilities of a mySAP solution that can be customized and implementation should support the business objective.
Analysis of the solution characteristics
The upgrade from R/3 to mySAP 2004 ERP is largely a contract change with a little bit of additional technology available. However, the upgrade plan to mySAP 2006 or 2007 is more pervasive technology upgrade as well as the ability of the enterprise service architecture i.e. BPP [Business Process Platform] which will be one of the most important technology upgrades and strategic decision that one can make. Flexibility drives the emergence of the Business Process Platform, which will enable business process creation, deployment and monitoring using service-enabled applications.
Net Weaver is redefining SAP’s role in the technology market from a pure packaged business applications to a one-stop-shop provider of flexible business process components and the supporting technology to orchestrate business process i.e. BPP as per definition of Gartner as mentioned above. In order to take the advantage of Net Weaver component the organization necessarily doesn’t have to upgrade to mySAP. The organization will be required to upgrade to enable business process composition through a business process platform.
The organization should look beyond using components for integration in order to understand the impact of Net Weaver. It should not be focused as a user adoptation of Net Weaver component just because SAP has repackaged Net Weaver as a part of mySAP Business Suite Contract. The organization will need to adopt SOA and build plans for the cultural change required for Net Weaver to enable business composition.
SAP Net Weaver Project – tactical guideline: - [as recommended by Gartner]
Review the current SAP license agreement to check platform and integration component are included
Clear understanding of the Java content and new system management skills that will be required to run each component.
Review of the current operating system and database infrastructure standard to ensure that the exact releases are supported by SAP
Careful planning of system landscape
Review of the full impact of Net Weaver 2004 on the enterprise architecture standards.
Upgrading to mySAP ERP 2004 – strategic planning assumption
SAP has provided a four-year evolution path for mySAP ERP users to transition to Enterprise Service Architecture [ESA] The ultimate goal of ESA and Net Weaver is to enable users to implement a business process platform [BPP] environment.
Gartner suggests that users only consider mySAP ERP 2004 or later releases in upgrade justifications. Users should upgrade after creating a plan that is based on need, and which balance risk and reward. Understanding long-term business strategy is a critical step in this process. Additionally, educating the enterprise on how to take advantage of SAP’s strategic plan is also critical. Effective planning will make the difference in investing at the right time and avoiding costly risk.
Impact analysis of mySAP ERP on the organization is very important in terms of the vision and the strategy behind SAP’s push to service – oriented architectures [SOA] and BPP. Point to be noted at this juncture is that 50% of the SAP installed base will not have actually performed the upgrade from R/3 to mySAP. This will primarily be because of a lack of knowledge about how to justify the cost and benefit of upgrading; because the user organization lacks an overall SOA strategy.
Long-term & Short-term benefit and risks
· SAP plan to productize the BPP, allowing user a ‘ one-stop shop’ for traditional business applications and technology and business process components to build differentiating, end-to-end and dynamic business processes.
· SAP will use the elements of the BPP to enable an ecosystem of partners to build custom and packaged extensions that meet customer-specific requirement. But many of the technologies and services have not yet been delivered, SAP has already begun to build the ecosystem.
· The tools and technology to fully enable user-oriented business process modeling are still emerging and in many cases, real end-user-process does not exist. Although SAP has articulated this vision to the installed base, many user do not understand how it will directly affect their environment either positively or negatively.
· SAP is in the transition and as a result of which users have to work at separating the vision from reality and in many cases, must develop an internal competency to understand how to make the most of the BPP environment before SAP’s promised delivery date of 2008.
· In short-term technology –related enhancements will overshadow and may in fact replace investments in traditional enhancements that are specific to business area such as supply chain or an industry. While there is value in technology-driven enhancements that result from the integration of Net Weaver with the applications and then to ESA, many users will still need core enhancements to achieve industry-or domain-related benefits.
· The execution side of SAP lags in their own understanding of how the long-term strategy impacts short-term decisions. Users will also begin to see impacts of SAP service and support capabilities as these areas will be tested most as users begin to take advantage of uncharted waters such as support ecosystem vendor products, use of services in a new business process or use of Net Weaver components in areas that are external to SAP business applications.
Upgrade benefits to consider
· Functional enhancements – Users should consider two types of enhancements in mySAP ERP 2004; core functionality changes and technology-related enhancements. The core enhancement will only benefit one part of the enterprise. Technology-driven enhancements will more likely exists across the application set and apply to many scenarios and many parts of the enterprise. Users should calculate the benefits of both of these types of enhancements based on functional need and enterprise fit. Note that xApps will contain both types of enhancements. Access to xAPP and other mySAP Business component should also be part of any upgrade justification exercise.
· Enabling a BPP – It is impossible to assign a number to this because delivery will not be achieved for at least three more years. But the users who have an SOA strategy or have begun to enable a BPP will have a better understanding of how their organization will benefit from the ability to orchestrate new processes.
Upgrade strategy
· When considering an SAP upgrade, it is important to consider the drivers for the upgrade and use them to determine the best path forward. The cost and risk vs. the rewards will depend on the functional enhancement that can be leveraged from the technology.
· Upgrade directly to mySAP 2004 :-
Pros – ECC [ Enterprise Central Component] is fairly similar to R/3 Enterprise and access to Net Weaver components is included as part of the license. It includes a portal-based user interface for ease of use, analytics and enhancements to specific functionality
Cons – The primary risk with this version depends on how much of the new functionality one choose to implement and how much of Net Weaver one choose to deploy. Implementation of Net Weaver will require an investment in technology skills and the possibility of a more-complex landscape with more databases to maintain and higher operation costs. The latter will depend on how the product is deployed. But the users of some industry add-ons may be required to wait until mySAP ERP 2005 is available, because all industry add-ons will be synchronized with a mySAP ERP release. This means that in future, industry add-ons will be Industry Extensions and will be shipped with mySAP ERP.
Recommendation – In case new functions extend beyond mySAP ERP, then this component will be more integration-ready for operations with other SAP Business Suite component. However, if no new functions are needed, then this path will be similar to the R/3 Enterprise upgrade path with exception of re-licensing costs.
· Alternative upgrade option is to perform a technical upgrade to R/3 and plan for an upgrade to mySAP ERP by 2009. This option is more driven by the fact that the ESA version of mySAP ERP will be available in 2007 at the earliest, with stability occurring for most users in early 2008. The combination of ESA and Net Weaver will have evolved at this point to support a user business process platform.
However, the migration to this version will become more complex and costly.
This option of upgrade will enable the organization to extend the useful life of application at a nominal cost while waiting for mySAP ERP to mature and for ESA to become real. In case the upgrade is more aligned towards ESA functionally, need to wait unit 2009 when ESA and Net Weaver are expected to reach maturity levels for mass-market adoption.
Upgrade costs / risks to consider
· Release – level availability – Industry solution users should check with SAP on availability of new releases of these solutions. Many solutions are available with MySAP ERP 2003 (as it was largely similar to R/3 Enterprise) with no new enhancements available with my SAP ERP 2004. mySAP ERP 2005 will be the release through which industry components will be synchronized. Because mySAP ERP 2005 will not be generally available until early 2006, user should not expect more significant enhancements until the release of mySAP ERP 2007.
· Maintenance cost – Increase in maintenance cost should be measured against increased costs to support older releases of the R/3 products. There is also more risk with SAP support and services offerings as users expend into “ newer” area like working with Ecosystem vendors and new Net Weaver components.
Recommended decision framework to estimate upgrade path :-
Gartner has developed the following methodology to estimate the appropriate path.
· First, estimate the level of effort and cost assigned to move to a specific release.
· Second, estimate the business value that the organization will receive from that release.
Current implementation enabled with planning & collaboration tools and XI for ecosystem and multiple ERP integration backed by Biz intelligence through BW
To be:
Value added components to be introduced – both SAP & non-SAP.
Leverage the platform to support the extended enterprise through A1 / B1
Enable outsourcing through integration with partner systems (shared services, BPO opportunities) which has re-usability & replicability across the enterprise
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
ERP Implementation - Prisma
PRISMA ………………. Prism for ur vision & ideas
Monday morning in M/s Prism Inc is very busy day for the MIS team, marketing team and sales team. They publish their turnover data for the previous week to their management for performance reporting.
Mr CIO of Prism is very busy trying to push his battery of data entry operators [ other wise designated as MIS managers ] to get the Sales data collated for the week. The team is struggling to put the data into a standard template as preferred by the Mr CEO since the data have to received by them from all corners of the market in a multiple formats with non-standard product description. The non standard data is an accepted reality in the organization. The Sales force have been given complete flexibility in terms of data collection. The Marketing Head and CEO both feel that this a favor that these guys are doing to the organization. Because their prime job is to do selling in the market place and not data collation.
While, Mr CIO is dire hurry to get the weekly sales report for the marketing director and stressfully sitting in his office, gets a service call from a vendor. He promptly shouted back to the vendor in a very dismal mood and said “ Don’t you know that today is Monday. I have no time to take your call early morning and waste my time.” Reply from the vendor “ I know Sir, today is monday …but couldn’t understand what so special about the day?” Mr CIO said “ It is our sales report day. You SME vendors will understand all these. We report sales for the week to the management board on this day every week” Vendor replied with a surprise “ But Sir, we do it every hour, everyday! From our system data flows automatically to us with every invoice that we raise”. Mr CIO with great surprise disconnected the phone but keep wondering “ How is that possible!”
During the sales review meeting with board members, CEO broached the topic of everyday sales report review in view of growing competitiveness in the market place and with increase in number of product ranges and its variants. The immediate reaction of the Marketing director is like “ how that is possible?” He reacted by saying “ Do you expect boys to sit back in office and collate sales numbers instead of pushing sales in the market place?” CEO looked at CIO and asked “ Can IT do something in this area ?” Mr CIO remembered what his vendor told him in morning about tracking of sales data every hour, responded by saying “ I think the same could be done by doing ERP system implementation. Somebody in our vendor organization was mentioning that they track in the system almost on hourly basis”. Mr CEO said “ But we also get our sales data from the system. Then in that case the same should be possible in our organization also”. Mr CIOreplied in confused manner “ But we have our systems which are all localized at the sales offices spread across various locations and they are not integrated. Hence, we get the data from each of the sales offices and collate the sales data centrally in the MIS department for weekly review. The entire activity requires atleast one full working day for data to get collated at the Head Office for Sales Reporting. On-line data capture and reporting requires implementation of ERP system for the entire enterprise.” CEO immediately said “Then lets go for it”. Mr CFO replied “ But this is a very expensive proposition. ERP implantation is very resource intensive and returns on that investment may not come that thick and fast”. CEO said “ Lets have a full fledged board meeting on the same immediately to have some detailed level of understanding ”. On the next day Mr CIO prepared a detailed level presentation covering various aspects of ERP system, its deliverables and benefits to the organization. But the board members seem to be not very convinced with the fact that the unique business practice and processes could be easily put into the system easily which are currently being done by their high skilled and trained resources of the organization. Further, all of them are very concerned as to how suddenly the age old work practices could be changed overnight for which the organization had spend fortune for training and development of their resources. On hearing such apprehensions, CEO requested to each of the board member to put down their expectation from the proposed ERP system in order to engage some implementation consultant who have good experience in such implementation and have better understanding of the industry best practices.
The exact from the minutes of the meeting of the board held are ……………
Marketing Director expects that sales data to be made available in the system with every invoicing done in the sales office across all markets and location. The data must be available on real-time basis.
Finance Directors expects a very ROI from this investment in qualitative terms
Supply Chain Director expects that system will be able to help the business to optimize the inventory holding and do the demand servicing on least cost basis
Technical Director expects system to improve upon the Good Manufacturing Practices and measure production efficiency
CIO expects the system should enable to drive ‘ single version of truth’ in terms of data and reports
CEO expects the system to be a ‘decision support’ and ‘decision enabler‘.
As per instruction of CEO, all these expectations are collated and CIO briefed all potential ERP consultant for proposal.
Almost, all reputed consulting firms are invited for their presentation to the Board on the proposal. Everybody has impressed that all the stated expectations and objective will be delivered but everybody has left the board with some after thoughts by using some terms like Business Process definition, Change management, Change agent, Project Governance and Role definition, Enterprise scope definition, User classifications, training etc. The entire Board suddenly started realizing that onus of such ERP system implementation of more them rather than on the consultants.
Now, the entire board is grappling with these terminologies and trying to decipher more appropriate meaning in context to their own business. Realization has started dawning on them that ERP implementation success lies more on the business rather than on the quality of consulting firm. The debate and deliberation is still on since no consultant can provide input to your business since YOU KNOW THE BEST…………………..
Come, let’s see whether we can provide you with any cues and pointer to sharpen your own thought processes, so that you have a better clarity and understanding about of all these buzz words and terminologies which are frequently used by your consultants. We shall try to walk you through our library of experiences which we have gathered in a very hard way in the past. You share your pain points and we shall try to apply our experiential learning on to it to make your journey more pleasant and smooth. Promise is not the moon or starts it is very hard-core ground level realities which people tend to overlook during such grand finale.
For more information please constact us at prisma.advisory@gmail.com
Monday morning in M/s Prism Inc is very busy day for the MIS team, marketing team and sales team. They publish their turnover data for the previous week to their management for performance reporting.
Mr CIO of Prism is very busy trying to push his battery of data entry operators [ other wise designated as MIS managers ] to get the Sales data collated for the week. The team is struggling to put the data into a standard template as preferred by the Mr CEO since the data have to received by them from all corners of the market in a multiple formats with non-standard product description. The non standard data is an accepted reality in the organization. The Sales force have been given complete flexibility in terms of data collection. The Marketing Head and CEO both feel that this a favor that these guys are doing to the organization. Because their prime job is to do selling in the market place and not data collation.
While, Mr CIO is dire hurry to get the weekly sales report for the marketing director and stressfully sitting in his office, gets a service call from a vendor. He promptly shouted back to the vendor in a very dismal mood and said “ Don’t you know that today is Monday. I have no time to take your call early morning and waste my time.” Reply from the vendor “ I know Sir, today is monday …but couldn’t understand what so special about the day?” Mr CIO said “ It is our sales report day. You SME vendors will understand all these. We report sales for the week to the management board on this day every week” Vendor replied with a surprise “ But Sir, we do it every hour, everyday! From our system data flows automatically to us with every invoice that we raise”. Mr CIO with great surprise disconnected the phone but keep wondering “ How is that possible!”
During the sales review meeting with board members, CEO broached the topic of everyday sales report review in view of growing competitiveness in the market place and with increase in number of product ranges and its variants. The immediate reaction of the Marketing director is like “ how that is possible?” He reacted by saying “ Do you expect boys to sit back in office and collate sales numbers instead of pushing sales in the market place?” CEO looked at CIO and asked “ Can IT do something in this area ?” Mr CIO remembered what his vendor told him in morning about tracking of sales data every hour, responded by saying “ I think the same could be done by doing ERP system implementation. Somebody in our vendor organization was mentioning that they track in the system almost on hourly basis”. Mr CEO said “ But we also get our sales data from the system. Then in that case the same should be possible in our organization also”. Mr CIOreplied in confused manner “ But we have our systems which are all localized at the sales offices spread across various locations and they are not integrated. Hence, we get the data from each of the sales offices and collate the sales data centrally in the MIS department for weekly review. The entire activity requires atleast one full working day for data to get collated at the Head Office for Sales Reporting. On-line data capture and reporting requires implementation of ERP system for the entire enterprise.” CEO immediately said “Then lets go for it”. Mr CFO replied “ But this is a very expensive proposition. ERP implantation is very resource intensive and returns on that investment may not come that thick and fast”. CEO said “ Lets have a full fledged board meeting on the same immediately to have some detailed level of understanding ”. On the next day Mr CIO prepared a detailed level presentation covering various aspects of ERP system, its deliverables and benefits to the organization. But the board members seem to be not very convinced with the fact that the unique business practice and processes could be easily put into the system easily which are currently being done by their high skilled and trained resources of the organization. Further, all of them are very concerned as to how suddenly the age old work practices could be changed overnight for which the organization had spend fortune for training and development of their resources. On hearing such apprehensions, CEO requested to each of the board member to put down their expectation from the proposed ERP system in order to engage some implementation consultant who have good experience in such implementation and have better understanding of the industry best practices.
The exact from the minutes of the meeting of the board held are ……………
Marketing Director expects that sales data to be made available in the system with every invoicing done in the sales office across all markets and location. The data must be available on real-time basis.
Finance Directors expects a very ROI from this investment in qualitative terms
Supply Chain Director expects that system will be able to help the business to optimize the inventory holding and do the demand servicing on least cost basis
Technical Director expects system to improve upon the Good Manufacturing Practices and measure production efficiency
CIO expects the system should enable to drive ‘ single version of truth’ in terms of data and reports
CEO expects the system to be a ‘decision support’ and ‘decision enabler‘.
As per instruction of CEO, all these expectations are collated and CIO briefed all potential ERP consultant for proposal.
Almost, all reputed consulting firms are invited for their presentation to the Board on the proposal. Everybody has impressed that all the stated expectations and objective will be delivered but everybody has left the board with some after thoughts by using some terms like Business Process definition, Change management, Change agent, Project Governance and Role definition, Enterprise scope definition, User classifications, training etc. The entire Board suddenly started realizing that onus of such ERP system implementation of more them rather than on the consultants.
Now, the entire board is grappling with these terminologies and trying to decipher more appropriate meaning in context to their own business. Realization has started dawning on them that ERP implementation success lies more on the business rather than on the quality of consulting firm. The debate and deliberation is still on since no consultant can provide input to your business since YOU KNOW THE BEST…………………..
Come, let’s see whether we can provide you with any cues and pointer to sharpen your own thought processes, so that you have a better clarity and understanding about of all these buzz words and terminologies which are frequently used by your consultants. We shall try to walk you through our library of experiences which we have gathered in a very hard way in the past. You share your pain points and we shall try to apply our experiential learning on to it to make your journey more pleasant and smooth. Promise is not the moon or starts it is very hard-core ground level realities which people tend to overlook during such grand finale.
For more information please constact us at prisma.advisory@gmail.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
