What’s the best IT team structure for true business process transformation? That’s a question we hear regularly from the manufacturing and distribution teams looking to work effectively as they start an ERP project.
It’s important that the company set the best organizational structure to support the business transformation plan. When the plan calls for a consolidation of systems into a single instance ERP, the team structure is especially critical due to the integration points throughout the departments and functional areas.
Looking further, there are many distinct integration points between the companies that support the move to a single “Multi-company” ERP system. The scope of the planned systems and organizational change is substantial. In most cases, we see three distinct areas as providing leadership and management of integration points, and they involve Program Management, Functional, Technical, and Data.
IT Team Structure
The Program Management office will be a cross functional management team to which the CIO will be a member along with key executives from each of the companies. This team will constantly review progress along the defined transformation roadmap and adjust priorities based on defined ROI, risk, and pre-requisite parameters. We are in the early stages of the project and this team has been heavily involved in defining the business case, identifying vulnerabilities, evaluating feasibility of the various classes of software involved in the transformation, and assessing the scope of organizational change and completing a stakeholder assessment. The CIO in partnership with the Ultra Senior Manager is serving a key facilitation role during the PMO meetings.
A Functional team will consist of business process owners, IT business analysts, Ultra business analysts, and ERP functional consultants. Like many rapidly growing mid-size enterprises, the company is struggling to fully backfill their key process owners. To compensate we will establish IT Business Analysts that will aligned with the process owners. They will assist with system documentation, development of training materials and will become proficient in the parts of the software applicable to their scope of support. This will include screen tailoring. The IT Analysts will develop specifications for required enhancements and report development. During their ramp up Ultra Business Analysts and Change Manager will be providing additional support. The IT Business Analysts will take the lead on user training and assume functional support concurrent with go-live.
The Technical Team will consist of an IT Technology Manager overseeing sub-teams focused on Network Architecture, ERP software deployment, Report Development, Interface Development, Enhancement Management, System Integration, ERP Data Conversion, User Security, etc. Ultra’s Technology Manager is partnering with the IT Technology Manager to ensure proper architecture decisions are in place with clear responsibilities and accountabilities among the various technology partners in play.
The Data Team will consist of data analysts and a database administrator. The consolidation of the systems will require a major rationalization of the de-normalized master files with heavy ETL (extract transform load) work. The data analysts will identify the sources of the key legacy master data and catalog the data elements of each file. In partnership with the ERP functional consultants the data analysts will identify the target formats for the tables and write ETL specifications for the technical team.
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