If your company is evaluating a major change to your ERP systems, here are the steps to consider.

Value planning

1. Defining how the systems will add value to the business – both quantitatively and strategically.
2. Aligning the strategic direction of the company with the operational changes you need to make.
3. If they don’t exist yet, blueprinting your business’s processes and evaluating the types of changes that will drive the most value.
4. Assessing the pain points in the current business and understanding how changes to underlying systems can address them.

Selection

1. Defining the processes of the business – How will you communicate what your business is as an operating entity to software vendors?
2. Defining your key requirements – What does your business do to compete more effectively and run more efficiently than other companies?
3. Knowing how to separate technology that adds value from technology that demos well.
4. Evaluating and short listing the most qualified solutions and implementation vendors.
5. Working with short-listed vendors to create demos that allow your staff to compare them “apples to apples.”

Budgeting

1. Accurately budgeting licensing and infrastructure, including understanding the various discounting levers available.
2. Accounting for hidden costs like bandwidth, additional hardware, and your people’s time.
3. Ensuring adequate investment in change management and training.
4. Staffing adequately and ensuring the right people are in place to oversee the program.

Program management / implementation

1. Executing the implementation with discipline and predictability.
2. Structuring governance over key decisions on the project.
3. Containing scope and budget.
4. Understanding how the project interacts with day-to-day business activities and other projects, and being able to make decisions about tradeoffs of staff’s time and attention.

Governance and sustainability

1. How will the business create ideas for improving the system once it is live?
2. How will the ideas be grouped into projects and prioritized?
3. How will the projects be executed in a way that controls risk to the business?
4. How will you ensure that future decisions about system changes control risk and don’t create unnecessary complexity and chaos?