Welcome. Please do step through the door of digital transformation. No, you don’t need to take off your shoes. Please sit down and enjoy a highly intuitive business experience. Connect your devices, transform your marketing, break down those silos, redefine customer engagement.
These benefits, among many others, are promised to those organizations that invest in intuitive and intelligent technologies designed to streamline every part of the business. One such technology is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. This is one of the behemoths of the digitally transformed world, allowing organizations to pull together multiple operational threads to create a cohesive digital fabric that improves productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.
It can also fail to do any of these things if not implemented correctly.
01: You didn’t put people first
Technology offers your business so much potential and can fundamentally change how your employees engage with the business, their roles, and your customers. But in order for this to happen, don’t focus on the technology first, focus on people. Change management, training, and skills development – these should all be a mandatory part of any ERP implementation to ensure your teams will use the technology to its full potential. Poor user adoption and training mean that people won’t use the technology properly nor will it gain the traction it should to deliver the results it promised.
02: It’s a cost waterfall
Cost overruns are a common complaint when it comes to ERP implementations. This is the last thing you need, especially as you’re wanting to save money with your ERP solution, not add even more numbers to your bottom line. Often, these unexpected costs come about as a result of poorly assessed systems and a badly planned project outline. If you don’t accurately determine your technical expectations and requirements alongside those of your people, then your scope won’t fit and then you will pay more for project length, tech, integration, and customization. This risk comes hand in hand with unexpected delays that
03: Data. Oh, the data
Data is key to the success of your ERP over the long and the short term. You can’t afford a fractured system that’s incapable of sourcing data throughout your business, nor one that doesn’t deliver high-quality data. A well-designed and well-implemented ERP should provide you with a single and accurate source of data for the entire organization. This means that when you implement your ERP you need to know exactly where your data resides and ensure that every last drop is dragged into your ERP database. If you don’t have the right scope or ERP team on your side, you run the risk of missing the data sitting in older systems, not prioritizing data properly, and limiting data quality. The latter is essential as it removes the risk of data duplication, obsolete information, inconsistent data, and so much more.
You want clean, consistent, high-quality data from across the business and this can only be achieved with a cohesive implementation that has focused on cleaning the data and testing it before going live.
ERP can be a magnificent investment, but it’s important to know the risks so you don’t know failure
Failure doesn’t come with risks. It’s only what happens when your business doesn’t pay attention to the gaps in procurement, project planning, people, and processes. These four Ps are crucial to ensuring that you mitigate or minimize the risks of your ERP implementation and gain all the benefits that the system promised. And you can do so by working with a third party that understands exactly how to recognize the risks within your business and can provide clear steps towards resolving them.
Mint Group UK has been working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for years, and our expertise extends well beyond knowing the Why of implementing this ERP platform and into the realms of How, What, and When. We have premium solutions designed specifically for assessing your environment and establishing clear implementation parameters, and we collaborate with you to train your people, get executive buy-in, manage security, streamline your data and so much more. We offer you the expertise you need to bypass the risks, avoid failure and instead enjoy sweet digital success.
Let Mint help you drive your next successful Dynamics 365 implementation using our ProActive methodology.
