Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems offer much potential to improve your way of doing business.  By providing accurate, real-time information throughout your supply chain, an ERP system can help your company be more competitive. Seamless integration of information flows across all departments through a centralized database, provides a unified view of the business, and enables management to make more effective, timely decisions. A successful ERP implementation can provide better business intelligence, streamline business operations, reduce costs, enhance collaboration, and ultimately help you grow your business.

Knowing the common reasons ERP implementations fall short and how to avoid them can save you valuable time and money and help make your project a success.

Sin #1: Overlooking the purpose of the ERP system.

Companies can focus too much on replacing the systems and functionality they have and fail to learn enough about the capabilities the new ERP system can deliver. In other cases, ERP implementation begins without a clear understanding of the benefits that will be attained. As a result, they are not measured against the pre-implementation environment.

In addition, many companies go through ERP implementations without a step-by-step roadmap, making it difficult to achieve continuous improvement.  It is also a mistake not to analyze existing business processes and identify opportunities for organizational
improvement, expecting the software to cover up weaknesses.

Best Practice: Focus on process improvements. It is easy to lose sight of process analysis during an ERP implementation. But the prime focus should be optimizing existing processes and tailoring the system functionality to complement them. However, companies should be careful not to automate non-value-added processes in the new system. It is also important to measure process effectiveness and efficiency regularly and to adopt and enhance best practices extensively.

TO BE CONTINUED…………………….