If you are a small-to-medium business owner, making a software purchase that will permeate all aspects of your business is daunting, and often terrifying. Getting an Enterprise Resource Planner may be your first major software purchase. You probably have many questions about cost, implementation time, hosting, effect on business processes, impact on employees and customization needs. These are all important decision factors that can be addressed through teamwork within your company and by working with implementors you trust.
While the desire for a silver bullet - especially for fast-growing organizations - is a wish that might never come true, a flexible Enterprise Resource Planning software can provide a dependable advantage to your operations and development. When considering implementing this type of solution, you are likely to find contradictory, and sometimes anxiety-provoking, facts or advice.
We're here to:
1. Address the questions and concerns new ERP clients face.
2. Explain the resulting impacts.
3. Provide our approach for great implementations.
Here's what you can expect in terms of business process management:
A new ERP can either support or change your current business processes.
Adding in or changing an ERP can have low to very high impact on your current business processes. Because ERPs can often accommodate a large variety of workflows, it is up to the user to specify how they want to apply the tool. This means that in order to successfully make the transition to a new system, some decisions will need to be made about how you foresee your team working with the software. Furthermore, it is important to also consider the cost trade-offs of customizing the software to your methods over using the built-in workflows.
Keys To Success
1. In our experience, the implementation consultation is not possible without a serious consideration of current business processes. This is an opportunity to optimize them and to consider any potential problems. Another bonus of outlining them is that the resulting documentation can often serve as a new training guide from incoming employees that will be on-boarded into your organization after ERP implementation.
2. Once outlines are complete, new processes and amended processes can be considered. This usually requires some information gathering and analysis to be done by our clients, as well as visioning of how they want to change things. Another important aspect is learning what the new ERP can do. In the case of Odoo, we provide demo instances for our clients from which they can learn. Often it is much more cost-efficient to do a few things 'the Odoo way' rather than a custom way.
3. Once you communicate your vision to us, we will configure and adapt to suit you. We will also try to produce the best cost-benefit analysis concerning which features you should customize, and which are better done 'the Odoo way'.
There you have it - some concrete advice on how to ease the implementation process, and how to get the most out of your investment. Feel free to contact us about this post.
Please continue to follow us as we release our other tips for a successful implementation!
ERP Implementation Tips