Because an ERP means greater transparency and enhanced communication between departments, it will provide a more integrated and streamlined way of doing business. Will an ERP improve your sales? The answer: Maybe. ERP solutions will never take the place of great sales staff working on your company’s behalf, but what they can do is provide [...]

You’ve finally pulled the trigger and have launched your new ERP system. It’s all systems go, and you’re staff is humming along, working on the system, practicing what they’d learned in training, and discovering new kinks that never seem to crop up until after the go-live date. What now? First of all, expect mistakes. In [...]

And now…the moment we’ve all been waiting for…sound the drums… Seriously, the moment of truth has arrived. That’s right: the launch. Or rather, it’s a few days before the launch of your ERP implementation, and your company is on the proverbial pins-and-needles as it prepares for the much-anticipated go-live date. Hopefully, if you’ve followed the [...]

If you’ve been following this mini-series on ERP implementation, you’ll remember that I wrote some tips in my last post about how to approach the kickoff of your ERP implementation process. Not the launch or the pre-launch, but rather the time immediately after you decide that, yes, you want to bring in a new ERP [...]

In my last post,  I offered some tips on hiring a consultant to manage the ERP implementation process in your organization. Once you’re in the thick of it, though, what should you do to maintain the momentum and lead your team to success? Keep communication lines open. It’s a cliche, but for good reason: lack [...]

If you’ve read the previous two posts about the challenges that must be addressed in order to ensure a successful ERP implementation, you know that while the latter isn’t impossible, getting to that point requires a lot of work and plenty of careful planning. In this post, I’ll describe in detail two more critical must-haves [...]

In my series of posts about the key factors in successful ERP implementation, I mentioned proper, comprehensive training as a major contributor to ensuring a company’s smooth transition to a new ERP system. Depending on the scale of the transition, training costs may consume 10-20% or more of an ERP implementation budget–not an insignificant amount [...]

In my last post I listed two essential factors that contribute to successful ERP implementation: management buy-in and employee buy-in. History is littered with examples of organizations who were dazzled by the promise of ERP companies, only to find themselves dealing with the devastating aftermath of abysmal employee morale, an exodus of management and sometimes [...]

Like everything else that requires time, money and more time and money, successful ERP implementation depends largely on one oft-overlooked step in the entire process: planning. With a little bit of foresight and a lot of careful planning, ERP implementation doesn’t have to be the painful, tooth-extracting process it’s often made out to be. In [...]