10 days to enterprise resource planning success

Learn how to put your customers first and achieve your strategic objectives with ERP

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Sixty percent of organizations fail to realize the business benefits they expected from their implementations.* That statistic reflects a long legacy of implementations focused on the system instead of the processes.

ERP implementations don’t deliver on promises when companies fail to:

• Define business strategy and desired business outcomes

• Set short- and long-term measurable goals and definitions of success

• Align the solution with the business strategy

• Maintain leadership commitment throughout the life of the project

• Focus on implementing essential features first versus a “kitchen sink” approach

When companies make these mistakes, employees don’t fully adopt the system, operations don’t improve as expected and customers aren’t impressed. Precious resources, energy and time are wasted.

ERP can and does deliver results

When ERP is implemented correctly, with proper planning and preparation, companies—of every size—realize extraordinary benefits. Companies take control of their data and are able to connect resources to deliver the great experiences customers value.

10 days to enterprise resource planning successThe capacity to connect, control and capitalize on data through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) promises to enable the quality customer experiences every business seeks. But the technology of ERP alone won’t deliver better service or promote innovation.

Table of contents

Day 1: Establish vision and 3 objectives

Day 2: Assemble the team 3

Day 3: Activate the team 4

Day 4: Define the 5 experience

Day 5: Assess business 5 processes

Day 6: Learn the canvas 6

Day 7: Determine solution 7 requirements

Day 8: Establish 7 communication strategy

Day 9: Create a risk 8 management plan

Day 10: Serve users 9

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Day 1

Establish vision and objectives

Define the end game before the project starts. Companies take on ERP implementations for a multitude of reasons, but they can be separated into two categories—transformational or operational. A successful ERP project starts with a clear definition of the vision and objectives for the organization as a whole.

Will your ERP implementation transform the company? Transformational projects address strategic objectives, such as:

• Consolidating operations across multiple units or acquired companies

• Creating a shared service capability

• Renovating the business through substantial redesign of processes, jobs or organizational structure

Or is your project intended to optimize operations? Operational projects focus on:

• Making incremental improvements and optimizations to current processes

• Refreshing technology and modernizing systems

• Leveraging “out of the box” ERP functionality for business process improvement

The measures of success

The next step is to document measurable objectives. You need a clear definition of what a successful future state looks like, what problems will be solved and what new capabilities will exist.

Day 2

Assemble the team

Executive buy-in is critical for ERP implementation success and should be clear to everyone in the organization. Acting as the liaison between the project team and executive-level stakeholders, the Executive Sponsor will monitor the project to ensure continuous focus on the desired business outcomes. The project team should be empowered to make decisions that will challenge status-quo. Such decisions may require extra support from the Executive Sponsor.

For the rest of the project team roles, clearly define responsibilities and expectations. Include subject matter experts from all affected areas of the organization for balanced representation on the team.

As you assemble the team for the ERP implementation, it’s critical all team members have a strong understanding of the business. You’ll get better buy-in for process changes if all departments feel they were well represented in discussions and decisions.

To ensure you can enlist the best people for each role, consider reassigning and backfilling some of their day-to-day responsibilities. The time investment of each team member may vary, based on how critical their expertise and input is to the business strategy driving the project.

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Define ongoing ownership

Identify who will be responsible—from both the business operations and IT sides—after the solution is live and into the future. Get them engaged early so they have the full history and background on the project.

Day 3

Activate the team

Once the team has been assembled, prepare the team to work objectively and collaboratively. Since the project will include people from different business units or departments, every member needs to commit to working as a team for the good of the project and its success.

Establish guidelines for conflict resolution and decision making. The team should understand the decisions they are empowered to make and which ones require leadership involvement. Clarify the roles and responsibilities of each team member, setting expectations for completion of tasks and ensuring decisions are aligned to desired business outcomes. Each member of the team must understand they will be held accountable for their commitments.

When you begin a project, things have a tendency to change. Therefore, you need an effective means for managing scope and change—identifying that upfront is critical. As the team is expected to approach business processes with an open mind, they should have a clear understanding of the balance the executive team seeks.

The executive team should establish the fundamental objectives guiding the ERP implementation, including:

• To what degree will we follow the out-of-the-box functionality?

• To what extent are we open to process change?

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Day 4

Define the experience

The ultimate, and often overlooked, goal of the ERP implementation is to improve your customers’ experience with your company. Your project team needs to evaluate the customer journey from beginning to end to understand areas for improvement.

Your employees are on the front lines with customers—the business management systems they use have a direct impact on their ability to positively impact the customer journey. The project team needs to identify the touch points that aren’t synchronized.

• Can employees get an accurate, up-to-date count of inventory in the warehouse without emailing/calling the warehouse manager?

• When a customer calls to place an order, can an employee provide immediate pricing on that first phone call?

Through the ERP implementation, you can remove barriers to great customer experience. With improved internal data sharing and visibility, the project team should focus on aligning processes and systems to reduce process gaps, overlaps and manual handoffs. Overlaps can create more work for the customer when they have to repeat themselves.

As you define the customer experience, focus on reducing customer effort. Issues to consider include:

• Assessing integration and collaboration with suppliers

• Accelerating response times to customers making inquiries about shipment tracking, invoices, returns, credits and more

• Improving internal data sharing and visibility to reduce the impact of organizational and information silos

Day 5

Assess business processes

A common misconception about ERP implementations is that the software will fix everything. In the real world, technology won’t fix inefficient processes and can’t train front-line employees to provide the experience your customers want.

An ERP implementation shouldn’t be viewed as simply a modernization of the functionality and business processes under your current systems. The current system may limit process options. With the new system, consider whether there are opportunities to streamline processes, standardize across similar functional areas and introduce automation to decrease error-prone manual intervention.

Revisit the goals you defined Day 1. Do any end-to-end processes need to be revisited to achieve goals like:

• Reducing time spent on month-end close?

• Improving your order to cash cycle?

• Reducing manual effort required in the record to report process?

It’s important to recognize that assessing and changing business processes is challenging for most businesses. There is likely to be push back. Recommending changes to the status-quo requires objective and creative problem solving.

As the team works through the business processes for each department, pay special attention to the points of interdepartmental coordination. Look for processes where hand-offs have caused friction in the past. Define how the process could be improved to simplify the customer experience and reduce the effort required.

Day 6

Learn the canvas

To help your team understand the potential benefits the new ERP system can deliver, they need to see it in action. Your team’s experience is likely limited to the legacy systems you are currently using. The project team should see demos and receive basic training on the new ERP system to get familiar with the software and its capabilities.

High-level, end-to-end process training like Quote to Order, Plan to Produce, Procure to Pay, Order to Cash and Record to Report for the entire team will provide broader context to understand the challenges each department faces. Project team members will be better equipped to visualize how business processes could be handled in the new system with an understanding of basic business process flows. Incorporating company-specific terminology into ERP demos will help the team visualize. Processes are more effective when they are presented with your unique nomenclature. In addition, the project team should receive training on how the ERP system will integrate with other systems. By answering questions and alleviating concerns about the way the system could function, you will build confidence in your project team—confidence they will need to evangelize the solution to other people in their department.

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Day 7

Determine solution requirements

As you prioritize the business processes to focus on first, the team needs to consider how to balance the amount of organizational disruption with the speed to benefit of the implementation. Identify Day 1 requirements versus those that could be introduced incrementally. Focus on solution requirements that maximize team member efficiency. Common priorities include replacing time-consuming procedures and providing better insight through dashboards or reports.

The next reality check is determining which resources are available to participate. By prioritizing requirements, you can take a phased approach to the implementation based on realistic availability of resources and a focus on functionality that promotes adoption.

Successful initiatives start with essential functions upfront followed by a plan for continuous improvement. For most organizations, ERP systems work in conjunction with line-of-business and ancillary systems. The project team needs to sort through the functionality and importance of each of the systems to ensure a coordinated approach. The project vision needs to look at all of the factors and applications the company relies on to take a holistic approach.

The infrastructure decision

For ERP implementations today, a key decision point is whether to host the application on premise, in the cloud or a combination of the two. For many organizations, the choice is based on regaining primary focus on their core business—whether that be manufacturing products or delivering services to customers.

Day 8

Establish communication strategy

Your communication strategy should be a living document, regularly reviewed and revised. The communication vehicles you choose should be customized to address your different stakeholder audiences: core team, partners, customers, vendors and board of directors (if/as needed).

When outlining your strategy, identify who is responsible for communicating to internal departments, customers, partners and vendors. Clearly define what needs to be communicated and when before choosing the right vehicle. Determine who should receive communications, including:

• Future users of the system

• Anyone directly impacted by the initiative

• Project stakeholders—both internal and external to the organization

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Simplify communications

The goal is to inform, as well as ease the fear of change. Timing and targeting of content is key. Plan a timetable for regular communication to keep everyone in the loop without overwhelming or boring them.

You may be automating manual processes, and the people who performed those tasks will be concerned about job security. They need to know they are valued and what they will be doing in the future. Continually assess how team members will do their job in the future. If their roles will be significantly impacted, plan for the change. Use Change History to identify areas of high risk and monitor change fatigue to keep your communication aligned with the needs of employees as the implementation progresses.

Day 9

Create a risk management plan

Risk management starts today and must be assessed and monitored through the life of the project. A successful project requires ongoing participation and active engagement from functional team members, project leadership and technical resources. In many cases, it is helpful to engage a dedicated resource to support the organizational change process or assign specific team members who have experience in system testing or training.

Risk planning will help your project team constructively identify and plan proactive steps to navigate potential issues that may surface during the implementation.

Common risk areas to think about include:

• Misaligned project assumptions—different expectations among stakeholders

• Technology—evaluate whether infrastructure needs a refresh and if cloud is an option

• Lack of leadership support or no visible executive sponsorship

• Failure to backfill existing schedules and workloads for key project team members

• Adoption and fear of change may mean users avoid opportunities to learn new processes and ERP functions

For large-scale implementations, define a structured approach to Test Case Management. Tools can track requirements through each stage of testing, including Microsoft VSTS. For geographically dispersed teams, identify the most effective training approach for your organization, like train the trainer via webinar or recorded training with live Q&A.

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Day 10

Serve users

Prepare to serve your users for the life of the solution. Lack of adoption of ERP systems often prevents companies from achieving the expected process improvements. With ongoing care, you will increase adoption of your new ERP system and realize more business value from your investment.

User adoption

An ERP implementation is no longer a project with a beginning and an end. By planning for continuous system and process improvement, your employees will find new ways to use the system to enhance their efficiency and customer experiences. DXC Eclipse’s approach helps you move from a technology and task-based model to one that focuses on user and customer experience. This approach allows your team to retain focus on the core ERP project objectives even after the implementation is complete.

Through proactive risk monitoring strategies, you can monitor user adoption and the impact on customer experience. Armed with meaningful and timely data in the key customer metrics, you can focus on customer profitability and service consistency.

Implement with confidence

At DXC Eclipse, we know the value of equipping your team to deliver the ultimate customer experience. Our approach is all-encompassing—from asking the tough questions to strategizing, designing and implementing the ERP solution that will synchronize all aspects of the business. To set you up for long-term success, we include additional benefits far beyond technology, including:

• Business Process & Performance Improvement: Identifies and prioritizes areas for improvements across all locations and business functions including supply chain, operations and finance. Establishes KPIs and baseline metrics from which to set improvement goals and track benefits realization.

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T 877.744.1360www.dxc.technology/dxceclipse

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, serving nearly 6,000 private and public-sector clients from a diverse array of industries across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network deliver transformative digital offerings and solutions that help clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology.

© 2018 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. ECL-007. June 2018

• Customer Experience Improvement: Develops strategies for improving both customer and user experience. Aligns people, process and technology to consistently deliver what your customers value. Reduces friction along the customer journey from order placement and receipt to returns, repairs, invoicing and collections—across all channels of engagement including self-service portals.

• Business Driven Enterprise IT Strategy: Includes strategy for data management and roadmaps to sequence initiatives that may include ERP, Business Intelligence and Analytics, configurators, customer/vendor portals, and integration with ERP systems. Includes identifying most relevant and suitable strategies to enable cloud, SaaS, security and disaster recovery for the business.

• Business Transformation & Organizational Change: Reinforces project and business outcomes through established change leadership and strategies for successful adoption including communication, involvement, organizational design, job redefinition, process training and more.

Who is DXC Eclipse?

DXC Eclipse, a practice within DXC Technology, helps enterprise and mid-market companies accelerate digital transformation, solve business challenges and deliver intelligent solutions that make a difference for clients, employees and partners. We believe in delivering expertise, project transparency and excellent customer service in every engagement.

With team members in North America, EMEA, Asia and Australia-New Zealand, we are uniquely positioned to deliver Microsoft Dynamics 365, ERP, CRM, business process, analytics and collaboration solutions to clients across the globe. The largest independent Microsoft Dynamics partner in the world, DXC Eclipse serves more than 4,000 clients across multiple industries. Our practice delivers services and solutions that positively impact our world today and into the future.

* Source: Panorama Consulting