Five ways to guarantee misfortune on your ERP transformation

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) transformations are difficult endeavours, often known to result in depleted balance sheets, public legal battles, and the displacement of technology executives.  

Despite the abundance of material prescribing successful methodologies for ERP implementations, there’s no shortage of unsuccessful implementations for business school students to study. We’ve therefore decided to approach the topic from the opposite angle, and in taking a leaf from the mathematics playbook, ‘invert’ the problem by looking at surefire ways to guarantee another rocky ERP journey. 

1. Partner with a group whose incentives are contrary to your own​ 

This can be through prolonging the project to increase their own total contract value or more subtly, by adding unneeded scope (which has the same outcome). ERP transformations can easily be doomed from the start by selecting a solution based on a recommendation from an advisor that just happens to have a ‘strategic alliance’ with a vendor, together with a large bench of certified personnel who flood the pitch at short notice to help you implement. ​ 

2. Start without a clear goal in sight​ 

One of the simplest ways to encounter misfortune early is to proceed with the transformation without having a clear business goal stated or measurable business outcomes agreed. Similarly, by avoiding writing a business case or writing one with such carelessness that all stakeholders have different expectations, the project can be pushed in multiple directions at any point along its journey. This means the project will compound issues throughout the implementation, when decisions can be made without reference to value and effectiveness, and flip between the many differing views.​ 

3. Only focus on the near term​ 

By focussing on the near-term, perhaps just the need to ‘go to the cloud’ before current version support is innocently withdrawn by the vendor, you can dramatically increase the likelihood that the solution doesn’t fit the evolving needs of the business. This can also be viewed as artificially reducing the scope to a digestible level. By focussing on what will make the immediate project easier to deliver without any thought to the practicable value and operations of the ‘Day 1’ solution, this seemingly positive point can cause a hectic hypercare phase and a rushed ‘Day 2’ project.​ 

4. Make the initiative wholly IT owned, led and managed​ 

Exclude the pesky business folk from the inception of the transformation and expect them to obediently accept the solution at go live. Designing the delivery plan so the business team are only exposed to the solution at the UAT stage will conveniently put a time pressure on them to accept the solution as is, without meeting any business needs. To cement this approach, choose a purely technically-inclined supplier without the context to understand the business’s point of view and needs.​ 

5. Underestimate the impact on your people​ 

By treating the ‘people’ side of change management as an afterthought, you can miss the only chance available of bringing the business on the ERP transition early. From then on, collaboration and acceptance will be an uphill struggle, sowing seeds of discontent at all levels of the project - from detailed design workshops to executive sign-offs on data migration.​