A successful ERP Implementation is carried out in several phases. Each phase involves different deliverables, exit criteria, and best practices.
Depending on the ERP implementation methodology chosen for your project, you may have more or fewer phases than those listed below. We know from experience that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach.
Nevertheless, there is a basic structure that most successful projects follow. At a high level, most ERP projects involve six phases: planning, design, implementation, testing, operation, and optimization.
No matter how many phases your project timeline has, or what you call them, each step has one or more critical success factors that define it. Planning and monitoring each success factor is the key to ensuring ERP success.
Phase 1: Planning the ERP Implementation
One of the phases that is often taken for granted—the planning phase—includes the most critical success factor: KPI validation. This is where the business benefits and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you defined prior to the ERP selection process are discussed. Alistar addresses these KPIs during the ‘Project Kick-off’ meeting.
When discussing these KPIs, you must ensure that they are realistic and measurable. It is also important to ensure that the KPIs are relevant. In other words, are you measuring the right things, or are you just measuring something for the sake of measuring it?
Our project manager continuously monitors these KPIs. This way, you'll know whether your project is on track to achieve the expected profit.
Phase 2: Design
The design phase is a more analytical phase of ERP implementation and involves activities such as business process blueprinting. During this analysis phase, the expected functionalities for specific business processes are identified.
If you’ve already gathered your ERP requirements during the ERP selection process, you have a solid foundation. At Alistar, we ensure that the groundwork for this blueprint is laid very early on—specifically during our ‘Discovery Visit,’ which we always conduct before demonstrating our software during the sales phase! This discovery phase, the subsequent demo, and discussions with your team during your ERP selection process all contribute to a thorough ERP analysis.
Although you may have seen an ERP demo tailored to your business needs, it’s important to reconfirm the technical feasibility of those requirements. How do you do this? By providing your business blueprint to your ERP vendor so they can use it to configure the ERP system during the next phase of implementation.
Phase 3: Construction
During the construction phase, the ERP software It is configured to meet business requirements, and code is used to work around a functionality shortcoming. The development process is best divided into different milestones or sprints.
For each block, milestone, or sprint, it’s best to create internal test cases so you can verify that the system behaves as expected. The more test cases the new block passes, the fewer bugs will be reported later in the project.
These test cases can be written by your staff, business analysts, developers, or your ERP consultants to test key features.
Phase 4: Data Migration
During the design phase, we also determined which data you will transfer from your old solution to your new ERP system.
Because most legacy systems also contain heavily corrupted data, this is a major undertaking that takes a lot of time. Furthermore, this ‘major cleanup’ can only be carried out by your own staff, because only they can assess what is high-quality data and what is not.
So be selective about what you want to migrate, and consider putting your old system into ‘read-only’ mode once your new ERP goes live. That way, you can still access the data and be more selective about what you transfer.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central provides convenient Excel templates (RapidStart configuration packages) for importing customers, suppliers, items, and so on.
Phase 5: Use
A solid go-live plan is crucial. Listing all the steps required to prepare the production environment is essential to help your team prepare for go-live. The more detailed the plan, the more likely it is to succeed. We recommend including details such as who is responsible for each task and when they have completed it. The Alistar ERP consultants will also be on-site with you throughout the go-live. This allows us to quickly address any issues, answer your employees’ questions, and provide hands-on optimization.
Another key to success during the implementation phase is end-user training. When users are prepared to use new ERP solutions, they’re more likely to adopt them on their own and less likely to report “bugs.” This training, of course, takes place before you go live.
It is common for untrained users to report issues that are not actually bugs, but rather result from incorrect procedures or missed steps. Even if these reported issues are not bugs, it can be frustrating for the end user to have to constantly contact the help desk.
Phase 6: Optimization Following ERP Implementation
A key success factor in the optimization phase is performance benchmarking. You’ve likely already assessed performance in the previous phases of the project. However, performance can’t be effectively measured until real users are operating in the production environment. Continuously monitoring and improving performance after the go-live is crucial to maximizing ERP business benefits.
It is therefore important to set aside a budget for these improvements after the go-live. For example, Alistar often includes a few days of support and optimization during the first billing run—roughly 30 days after go-live.
Other Success Factors for ERP Implementation
Although we haven't listed all the success factors for each phase, this post should give you a high-level overview.
Many of the success factors that were not discussed are activities that are spread throughout the entire project and cannot be limited to a single phase.
If you'd like to learn more about phase-specific or ongoing project activities, or how to get started with an ERP implementation, you can check out our Contact ERP consultants. We've already helped many companies successfully implementing and executing both technical and business-specific aspects of ERP projects
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