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”………….