Page 76 - MetalForming October 2011

ERP Implementations
organization.
• What works, and what doesn’t?
• What “workarounds” have employ-
ees created to make the current ERP system (assuming there is one) fulfills their needs?
• What are the organization’s key priorities?
• Why is the organization imple- menting a new ERP system? and
• Who is in charge of what?
As tip number six above states, busi- ness process reengineering should hap- pen before, not after, you implement your ERP software. This is key—no organization should dive into an imple- mentation before spending a large amount of time understanding how people work within the organization, and how the organization itself actual- ly works. No ERP software is so magical as to address these issues for you; you must take control and drive the reengi- neering so that the software you do select performs in the best possible manner.
Trust me—if you treat them poorly (or worse, imperiously), your staff will find a way to undercut you, your strategy and your software. And that’s a real danger.
Strategies for Failure
The second important point to remember concerns strategy. Not only do you need a clearly defined strategy, complete with deliverables that demand execution and the assignment of specific project leaders and execu- tives to answer the tough questions regarding your ERP implementation, you also need a strategy that addresses ERP system failure. As Nicholas Carr wrote in the Harvard Business Review: “It’s unusual for a company to gain a competitive advantage through the dis- tinctive use of a mature infrastructur-
al technology, but even a brief disrup- tion in the availability of the technolo- gy can be devastating. As corporations continue to cede control over their IT applications and networks to vendors and other third parties, the threats they face will proliferate. They need to pre- pare themselves for technical glitch- es, outages and security breaches, shift- ing their attention from opportunities to vulnerabilities.”
Carr’s idea is an interesting one: Companies that focus more on the gim- micks and hype surrounding an IT investment, and consider the invest- ment a sure-fire way to increase com- petitive edge, are focused on only one aspect of strategy. What he argues for, and what I agree with, is that compa- nies must be strategic about the inevitability of their system failing. Per- haps the system won’t go down with a major flame-out (like the ones that managed to take down Amazon and Skype), but instead will slowly and con- sistently be eroded by employees who
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