Consulting Horizon

Following are some of the benefits of conducting process diagnostic and IT strategy before going for any ERP implementation

Smooth transitioning-
- Conducting the process diagnostics will help organization in identifying the current state maturity and designing the processes as per the future business requirements thereby increasing the process maturity level.
- This helps in easy transition of key processes from the current state to the ERP environment.

Performance monitoring
- Benchmarking of key processes and target setting for performance monitoring helps in measuring the process performance in a better manner and realize the benefit from ERP implementation
- The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) definition done during process diagnostics helps in measuring the process performance and keeping the track of achievement against the target.

Separation of duties
- The definition of roles and responsibility of individual/department that brings in process ownership and accountability. The organization may be having the Organization design in place but re-looking will definitely make sense in order to assign the right KRAs to right personnel.

Roadmap for ERP
- An effective IT roadmap definitely helps in prioritizing the IT investment and taking the right implementation decisions at right time. This ensures that "IT" is always in sync with Business needs

Therefore I think if organization rally wants to realize the benefits from ERP implementation in a more effective manner, they should first conduct process diagnostic to understand the maturity level and IT strategy to lay the IT roadmap.

I think it’s very much important for any organization to place its strategy in place before going for implementation of any IT/Business process initiatives. The strategy for IT roadmap and placing the business processes in place helps the organizations in realizing true business benefits thereby improving ROI.

In my consulting career, I have seen some well known organizations going for ERP/IT applications without streaming their business processes. Initially they start towards the implementation and in the middle of implementation when senior management realizes that their business processes are screwed up, they start approaching the business/process consultants. However, at this stage no party gets benefited.

For the client team, its double pressure to concentrate on both IT and process implementation. For the business consultant it’s become difficult to fetch the right data at right time from right stakeholders. Because at this stage, the priority for any CIO becomes achieving the project timeline which has huge cost and time impact. However for the senior management or board of directors, it’s become very much important of getting the best for their organization from highly paid consultants. However, in most of cases, such situation becomes a PLATFORM for the senior management to fight against each other. Few of them try to cash on the situation for using it as a ladder for achieving the professional growth.

Such a dilemma becomes a testing time for the REAL CONSULTANTS on the ground for identifying the right STAKEHOLDER and sailing through the situation without creating any damage inside the organization.

Business strategy >> IT Strategy Roadmap and Business Process Re-engineering >> ERP/IT package implementation

I have also seen some organizations selecting vendors purely based on their “Low Cost” proposal. However I strongly believe that organization should have long term vision rather than short term view. They should conduct the evaluation of vendors based on TCO (Total Cost of ownership) and not on the OTC (One time cost) over the period of 3-5 yrs.