Business Process – Adopting Industry Best Practices (Part 2 of 3)
What ERP Vendors are saying?
Sales pitch of many ERP Vendor is that they provide the Business solution based on the Best Practice in your Industry. Many of the Industry leading ERP Vendors are providing bolt-on Industry specific Business processes based on Best Practices in that industry. Some of the leading ERP Vendors provide Best practice base lines products which include Detailed System and process documentation along with pre-configured systems.
What we suggest?
Because Wisdom can not be told; it is important to weigh the cost and benefit of adopting Industry Best practices. Especially in case of COTS products, any deviation from configurable process steps leads to Custom Development, which is always a costly proposition. In a away, when you adopt a COTS product, it is advisable to go with best practices inbuilt in the package. This reduces implementation time and subsequent maintenance cost. But this has to be compared with cost involved in organizational change management.
The success of your complex IT or ERP Projects primarily depends on the Project Initiation and Project Planning Phase. Unfortunately many companies rush through the Project Initiation & Project Planning Phase. As part of adopting Best Practices from the industry, following are some of the key activities during the Initiation & Planning face:
- define the future (TO-BE) business process keeping the strategic business objectives in mind
- using consulting support, identify the suitable IT/ ERP Vendor based on your unique needs
- Overlay the Business Best Practices to your proposed TO-BE processes and create an alternative fitment/ development needs need
- Considering high-value and High-impact processes, create Justification and Return on Investment for modifying the proposed TO-BE Process to converge to Best Practices
- Develop an organizational change management, communications, and training plan
- Forward looking implementation strategy with Project Plan including internal and external resource identification and deployment, project budgeting, contract negotiations, and quality assurance (QA) planning
In the third and final post we will see what are the key success factors and benefits that we can get out of it.
