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 [...]

No matter how simple or advanced your ERP or CRM is, and whether or not you think it hung the moon, it’s guarantee that you’re introducing it to a host of users who didn’t ask for it, care for it, think there was ever a problem that needed fixing , agree with the way you [...]

So you’ve decided to transition your company’s operations systems to a new ERP program. You’ve undoubtedly done your research and found the right software for your needs and your future growth plans. The kickoff starts soon, and you’re probably thinking: Now what? Organizational change can be nothing less than traumatic for companies, and installing and [...]

If you’re a small business owner — whether you have no employees or 100 — chances are, you have a smartphone. Whether it’s a Blackberry, iPhone, Palm Pre, or the Motorola Droid, you probably rely on your phone to manage your calendar, read your email, check the weather, catch up on the news, update your [...]

Some of you probably grew up knowing of nothing else but the Internet and laptop computing. I bet, though, that many of you can still remember when you and/or your employees first used a computer. If you remember making the shift from storing information in manila folders to file folders on a computer, you may [...]

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 [...]

Hackers get way more attention than they deserve. Sure, they can compromise giant, seemingly impenetrable companies, even scare governments, but if you pay close attention to how these opportunists actually crack into what appears to be the most secure servers in the world, you realize that what most of the attacks have in common is [...]

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 [...]