3 Critical ERP Project Issues You Need to Fix Now

1. Your ERP Budget Has Been Blown out of the Water

The effective utilization of any active ERP requires a clear-eyed vision when it comes to budgeting. This assertion is based on a fairly straight-forward belief that if an ERP manager doesn’t have the right financial resources at the right time, chances are something or someone will fall through the cracks, thereby creating a larger and more costly problem downstream.

Part of this concern is attributed to poor planning during the pre-build, pre-launch periods where everything should be laid out in a series of documents driven by a standardized and highly-granular ERP requirements gathering phase. However, given today’s enterprise economy, senior management will always tend to shortcut a budget element wherever possible. Because of this an ERP manager ‘must’ fight tooth and nail to get what is required prior to pulling the trigger.

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The upside is that you should always be afforded a financial safety margin, since something always goes wrong somewhere along the line. But at the same time, failing to behave responsibly in this event is likely to create a larger negative impact primarily driven by the necessity to go back to one’s enterprise’s CFO or COO to ask for money after-the-fact. That experience is unlikely to be a pleasant one across-the-board.

2. Your Implementation Schedule Is Skewed

Effective ERP implementation scheduling is somewhat like a war plan, where the best laid operational plans always go up in smoke just as soon as the first shot is fired. Nevertheless, you can shade your performance to the positive side by insuring your scheduling is drill-down perfect. If you mess up an ERP master schedule, everything that comes afterward will be misaligned, thereby rippling throughout the entire enterprise creating lost time, and worse, lost money on the bottom line.

3. Your ERP Manager Has Lost Sight of Project-Limiting Factors

An ERP system can only go as fast as its slowest element. This bit of arcane experience applies to the entire ERP implementation process, whether one’s system is highly-sophisticated, or a single module deployment. As discussed in an earlier article, an ERP system is only as ‘smart’ as its operators, and even simple ERP implementations can be ground to a halt by inexperienced users, clunky integrations and data errors. Consequently, a solid understanding of the ‘slow’ elements that apply throughout the implementation allow an ERP manager to identify and address areas of the project where they are losing the tug of war.