Heading into ERP Project Recovery? Keep These Tips in Mind

Heading into an ERP project recovery? If so you are not alone.

ERP projects fail for a variety of a reasons, as our colleague Salli Churchill showcased in an archived blog post entitled “What a Failed ERP Implementation Looks Like.” 

An ERP project recovery takes place when a past ERP project didn’t achieve the desired outcomes. As an example, perhaps there was no clear executive sponsorship of the ERP project. It’s also possible each functional area and department didn’t have a chance to confer with stakeholders to weigh in on setting ERP requirements, clearly defining expectations, milestones, or resource requirements based on the scope of the project.

Whatever the scenario, many manufacturing and distribution teams we speak with look to work smarter the second time around.

What is ERP Project Recovery?

For our purposes, we see an ERP project recovery effort as a strategic process to remedy past failures and weaknesses the organization experienced with a previous ERP project, which might have involved either evaluation, selection and implementation or a combination of those phases.

ERP project recovery takes a different and more strategic approach – overcoming and addressing the shortcomings of the past situation to proactively handle the weaknesses from the past.

Here at Ultra’s ERP consulting firm, we feel quite strongly that effective ERP project recovery puts the focus on business process improvement methodology, including weaving in change management

Getting Underway

Usually, ERP project recovery gets underway with a careful analysis of key areas such as:

• Exact reasons why the previous project failed
• Feedback from project team members, stakeholders and end users involved in the previous project
• The previous scope of work, project budget and timeline
• Organizational structure, accountability of ERP project team
• An analysis of ERP risk categories that were evident in the past project
• Whether a business case for change was clearly defined and communicated

While not an exhaustive list, these areas are useful as a starting point.

ERP Project Recovery or Business Process Improvement?

No discussion of an ERP project recovery would be complete without a reminder that the overall goal of leveraging enterprise technology is to achieve business process transformation.

When a recovery effort puts business process improvement as the highest priority, success and reduced time to benefit follows.

Ultra’s approach is designed to drive significant and sustainable business process improvement benefits.

A recovery project requires creating a vision of the future state from the current state – and on to defining the business value for the project.  Executed properly, this foundation will remedy the shortcomings of the past – and establish alignment of expectations with management, improve the efficiency of the team, eliminate process waste, and reduce the time to benefit for the project.

Resources

ERP project recovery is such an important topic, we’ll be addressing it again in an upcoming blog post, looking at areas of business process improvement to drive effective ERP project recovery.

Also look for an upcoming blog post where we’ll share a mini case-study detailing a current ERP project recovery with an aerospace supplier.

Looking to work smarter with ERP project recovery? Contact the Ultra team.