Posted on

Challenges faced implementing new ERP’s

The implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in a corporate environment poses several challenges. One significant challenge is the complexity of the ERP software itself. ERP systems are comprehensive, integrated software solutions that aim to streamline and optimise various business processes across different functions and departments. The sheer size and scope of these systems make their implementation a highly intricate task.

Another challenge is the customisation and configuration of the ERP software to fit the unique needs and requirements of the organisation. Since ERP systems are designed to cater to a wide range of industries and business models, tailoring them to specific organisational workflows can be a complex and time-consuming process. It often involves extensive customisation, mapping of existing processes, and data migration from legacy systems.

Data integrity and accuracy are crucial in an ERP implementation. Migrating data from disparate systems and ensuring its integrity during the process can be challenging. Organisations must cleanse and standardise their data, resolve inconsistencies, and reconcile discrepancies to ensure a smooth transition into the new ERP system. Failure to address data quality issues can lead to operational inefficiencies and decision-making based on inaccurate or incomplete information.

Change management is another significant challenge in implementing an ERP system. The introduction of an ERP often necessitates changes in business processes, job roles, and organisational structures. Resistance to change from employees, lack of user training, and inadequate communication can hinder successful adoption and utilisation of the ERP system. Effective change management strategies, including comprehensive training programs, user involvement, and clear communication, are crucial to mitigate resistance and achieve employee buy-in.

End-user training is vital for the smooth adoption and effective utilisation of the ERP system. Engaging supplier professional services can provide expertise and guidance in this area. However, there are challenges to consider. First, the training program should be tailored to the specific needs of the organisation, incorporating its unique business processes and industry requirements. The supplier professional services must understand these nuances and deliver training materials and sessions relevant to the organisation.

Additionally, coordinating training sessions with a diverse group of end users can be challenging. Employees may have varied skill levels, job roles, and availability for training. It is crucial to plan and schedule training sessions effectively, providing multiple opportunities for employees to attend sessions that align with their roles and responsibilities. Flexibility in terms of training delivery methods, such as in-person sessions, webinars, e-learning modules, and documentation, can help accommodate different learning preferences and availability.

Another challenge with supplier professional services in training is knowledge transfer. While the supplier’s consultants may possess expertise in the ERP system, it is essential to ensure that knowledge is effectively transferred to the organisation’s internal staff. This can be achieved through train-the-trainer programs, where key employees are trained by the supplier’s consultants and then become the internal trainers for the rest of the organisation. This approach ensures that there is ongoing support and knowledge retention within the organisation, reducing reliance on external consultants in the long run.

Testing plays a crucial role in ensuring the successful adoption and functionality of the ERP system. However, it can pose several challenges. One challenge is the sheer complexity of the ERP software, which often necessitates extensive testing across various modules, functionalities, and integrated processes. Organisations need to establish a comprehensive testing strategy that covers unit testing, integrated testing, performance testing, and user acceptance testing.

Regular communication and collaboration between the organisation and the supplier’s professional services team are crucial throughout the ERP implementation. The organisation should clearly define its expectations regarding testing and end-user training, including specific deliverables, timelines, and performance metrics. Regular progress updates, feedback sessions, and issue resolution mechanisms should be established to address any challenges or concerns that arise during the implementation.

Integration with existing systems and infrastructure is a common challenge in implementing an ERP. Organisations may have a multitude of legacy applications and disparate systems that need to be seamlessly integrated with the new ERP system. Ensuring data compatibility, system interoperability, and smooth data flow between different applications and modules requires careful planning, extensive testing, and potentially custom development work.

Cost is yet another challenge organisations face during ERP implementation. The process involves significant investments in software licenses, infrastructure upgrades, data migration, customisation, training, and ongoing maintenance and support. Organisations must carefully budget and allocate resources while considering the long-term benefits and return on investment that the ERP system can provide.

In conclusion, implementing an ERP system in a corporate environment presents several challenges. These include the complexity of the software, customisation and configuration needs, data integrity and migration, change management, system integration, and cost considerations. Addressing these challenges requires meticulous planning, strong project management, effective change management strategies, and a collaborative approach involving the supplier and employee stake holders throughout the implementation process.

Posted on

One Hand to Shake

It doesn’t matter how big or small a business is, nor the industry they are in, frequently we see clients from start-ups to world-class global entities,  sometimes struggling with the same underlying project issues that often stem from their first planning steps into go-to-market strategies applying the right balance of governance in each case.

Procurement

Go to market issues are often the root cause of digital transformation pitfalls, causing significant issues for major programs of work.

Think about all the applications you might need for a growing company. Rarely do you need (or can afford) to implement them all at the same time. Paired with the hectic and erratic nature of daily operations and business growth, planning for future systems does not even crop up as an afterthought. And so, clients come to us with a variety of systems, each installed at different times for a distinct purpose – usually acquired upon realisation it was needed yesterday.

With a company that is not used to the separate and often complicated application landscapes – different systems can become quickly mired in a complex web of operations that no one knows how to control, especially not the individual suppliers. You will find each is an expert in their own product, but little else. Pin-pointing a sole source of responsibility is like finding a needle in a haystack.

The entire process can be ground to a halt over time to what is lovingly referred to as a “software hairball” and can inhibit a team to run at its best, or in some cases, we have seen – at all. With everything coming to a standstill, this can have a detrimental impact on a company’s productivity, reputation, and revenues.

So, where to from here?

In our experience, we find that clients get the best result when their software applications are all integrated with each other so that they provide support for the company instead of issues.

When companies find themselves in the all too familiar situation, a clear procurement strategy with distinct phases of roll-out is essential to optimise a businesses’ key systems. When we implement this with our clients, we see them reap the rewards of increased business productivity, performance, and sales, as well as having a far better ability to make decisions based on more accurate, live information.

 Outsourcing IT

When deciding that your software needs an overhaul, outsourcing integration to consultants with specific subject matter expertise can pay dividends in both the time and cost of rolling out such a project. While internal teams do brilliant jobs of supporting and maintaining in house systems, the magnitude of a digital transformation project is often unrealized. In our experience, we see that clients get the most benefits from outsourcing these tasks to people with the subject matter expertise and decades of proven experience. The benefit of this also includes the fact that your internal staff can build on their current knowledge and even be mentored by the consultants you bring on, improving staff performance over time.

Support Agreements

A support agreement is just that; an agreement to work together with a consultant to best support the rollout of, and then the long-term maintenance of new systems. An agreement will outline what exactly is to be expected from your support team, the period they will deliver this support for, and include the associated costs for all activities. Without a support agreement, there is no documented understanding of what you expect from suppliers and what they will provide to you, or how much it will cost. This can make it difficult, if not impossible, to ensure you are getting the exact services that you need and makes it hard to predict how much it will cost you.

Another side benefit of this is risk management. With the many potential risks facing modern business including computer interruption, data privacy issues, and data protection issues, threats from viruses, hackers, potential hardware, and software faults or even your own staff can pose a significant business risk. Through a support agreement you mitigate these risks and your supplier should help you understand them through periodic reporting and business-focused meetings.

Handling all parties through a single supplier

With so many companies involved in a business’s technology, high-level management and executives might not necessarily have the bandwidth to manage all these relationships. We utilise our experience in project management and delivery with our clients, acting as external IT managers throughout the project, coordinating all these vendors on our client’s behalf. This reduces the number of times clients must spend chasing down companies and getting them to deliver adequate support and makes our job easier as we can communicate directly with vendors, bringing all the pieces of the puzzle back in one place, and fitting them together with ease.

Talk to us today to see how our integrated solutions supported by best practice consultants can transform your business environment and governance models moving forward.

 

Posted on

Can your staff access your offices’ local network remotely?

The local network in your office is far more secure than the one found at your employee’s home. The reason for that being because local networks are built to be completely shut off from other networks – ensuring data from your company, stays in your company, both in a physical and virtual sense. 

When you start to understand just how secure these networks are, you can also start to imagine some challenges that come up if your entire workforce needs to move out of your usual office or site.


Just how do you take work home if it’s built into a system where the main objective is keeping everything at the office? 

 3rd party applications  

While remote server access is possible with a variety of 3rd party apps, there’s a severe lack of them which are secure, user-friendly, and that don’t have performance issues. When used in the medium to long term, these apps tend to cause more problems than they solve, wasting hours of productive work time and potentially decreasing revenues – particularly an issue since these applications can cost in the tens of thousands to set up.  

 Having a secured network, such as a VPN, connected to your on-premises infrastructure. 

Cheap and cheerful, VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, have recently gained popularity with the general public as a way to ensure their personal data is secure when going about their usual digital activities. As it relates to work, VPNs can provide access to your company’s network files. Though even if you provide your staff with VPN access, a personal computer is a large variable and could still be compromised, which in turn would compromise company data.  

There are ways, however, that you can reduce security risks if you choose to utilise a VPN for remote work. These include: 

    • Ensuring you have proper measures to verify and authenticate employee login credentials 
    • Having a good firewall in place  
    • Setting up enforced time-outs for sensitive programs and applications 

Difficulties doing these crucial steps tend to appear if your company doesn’t have the supports needed to facilitate these actions using your on-prem infrastructures – many of which are outdated and limitations on how much they can be customised for security – for example, implementing life cycle refreshes on some hardware is merely impossible.

Taking work devices home. 

If it’s possible for employees to bring home their work devices, this mitigates the security concerns that come with personal devices. Create a ‘Remote Access Policy’ for employees so they are aware of how work-issued equipment should be treated when working remotely. By ensuring your employees’ homes are a safe environment for work from home, you can eliminate the risk of human error or potential cyber-security risks.

The caveat here is that sometimes it’s physically difficult, if not impossible, to move equipment from the office into each individual home.

As you can see, each of these solutions are all effective at addressing certain issues in the short term, but for many will only be a band-aid fix before more and more problems with security, productivity, and accessibility start to arise. Paired with the current uncertainty surrounding how long physical distancing measures, movement restrictions, and industry-wide shutdowns will be in place for, there’s only one option that covers your business for not only the “new normal” but also the increasingly digital future.  

Migrate to a platform like Office 365. 

This multi-factor authentication, multi-SaaS platform is more secure and complete than other cloud services. Communication systems between staff are going to be more important than ever before, so systems like Microsoft Teams will keep your employees connected, and accountable to their workloads.  

Correct implementation of Office 365 is crucial, and in doing so you can save precious time and money down the track with work automation and improved efficiency.

While it’s all good to migrate to a new system, all of them do need to be managed – someone to administrate it and keep the house in order, not much different from the old days when someone managed the filing cabinet.

Leadinveck has a number of solutions that molds large software platforms like Office 365, to fit and cater to all your individual businesses’ needs, and can provide ongoing support and maintenance, leaving you with more time to focus on what you do best – running your business.

Contact us today to see how we can help.

Posted on

ROI & Efficiencies of Smartsheet PMO’s

When I first started using Smartsheet in 2010, I was looking for a SaaS platform that would be able to provide some automatic features, as well as an easy project schedule for everyone to follow. I’d been through the trauma of in house server platforms heavily configured to either the financials or workforce management, rather than project delivery. So it was time for a change to something much more efficient and in my case, focused on collaborative project delivery capabilities.

The primary motivator at the time was the general reduction in Project Management staff in the PMO. That coupled with the increase in projects that were needed to be delivered was an aspect of the working day that started to become crippling, and some of our best PMs were leaving due to the overwhelming workloads. Another case of an under-resourced organisation.

In order to keep up with the flood of projects, and lack of resources I found Smartsheet provided the level of automation in project delivery I was looking for at the time, and importantly it was cost-effective. It allowed me to automatically issue emails to my resources when tasks were due to commence, finish or were overdue. I was also able to share the project schedule with the project sponsors at the time color-coded automatically to see at-risk tasks etc.

Since those early days, Smartsheet has evolved significantly. Now, easy to use live dashboards eliminate the need for project highlight reports, elements of automation that provide trackable approval processes from key stakeholders,  and resource forecasting are just a few new features. Even when a formal change approval process wasn’t established Smartsheet was an easy go-to for change requests during a project.

One of the features I have really found great in the more recent updates to Smartsheet has been the ability to create automatic update requests for resources when a dependant task has been completed early. This really makes your projects race ahead of schedule without the need to intervene too much. This is great if you have a pile of projects on your plate and you’re racing just to keep up with the communications to resources, and project meetings start taking a back seat while everyone is racing from one project to another. I like to think of this as automatic multitasking, rather than drowning in the race of a timely delivery.

Once I mastered the automatic features of project delivery, other staff in different areas of the organization started to notice the potential efficiencies. So I was approached to deliver operational efficiencies in contact centre environments, parks and gardens, support contracts, and a variety of other areas I found myself called to support with creative ideas to deliver time efficiencies. What I found was how easy it was to deliver tangible ROI’s in each case. If someone saved 4 hours a week on a repeatable task, creatively identifying what they could do with that new-found time slot became the ROI. Now repeat that concept across 10 staff, and you have one FTE (Full Time Employee). That becomes much more measurable in a business case. The trick is to establish the deliverables of what that FTE can now provide in your business case, rather than just calling it out as collaboration efficiencies. In a PMO, it is often the difference between full time and a part-time PMO manager. Or, one project co-ordinator for every three PM’s.

Configuring a cost-effective Smartsheet PMO environment in your organisation in line with your own governance model can be completed in less than a week, Staff Training, another week generally. So implementing is a pretty painless exercise, and the pay off is immediate.

Reach out for a 30-minute strategy call if you are looking for a cost-effective PMO collaboration platform. As a partner of Smartsheet, Leadinveck is fully backed and can provide on the ground face to face professional services support in Australia while you are building a new working environment.

For your free trial of Smartsheet click on the Smartsheet icon below.

Posted on

Strategic Enterprise SaaS (Software as a Service) Platforms

There is no denying the fact that the Cloud Services have changed the software landscape and the dynamics of the global high tech industry. The era of software installation from a Data Centre or from CD’s is coming to a close, as we now have stepped into an era of cloud computing and faster internet-delivered software applications. Cloud computing provides high-level services and scalable yet virtualised system resources over the internet, making it easier for companies existing in the high tech space to acquire cloud services on monthly or yearly subscriptions on a minimal fee. These cloud-based distribution models include Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) for system software and programs.

SaaS—What Is It, What It Caters To, What Can Be Done With It?

SaaS is one of the most common yet popular forms of cloud computing, in which the service provider hosts applications for B2B and B2C customers and make them available via the internet. The SaaS offerings cater to a wide variety of business applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource management (HRM), business intelligence software (BIS), email management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), workflow management, project management, sales management software, content management Software (CMS), database management, financial management, billing/payroll processing software among many others. Organizations using SaaS applications can customize the software, add plugins, and change configurational settings to meet their particular needs by remaining within the parameters as permitted by their service provider. However, they can’t change or customize its code or features according to their evolving software needs and specifications on their own.

The Changing Dynamics of the Software Industry!

According to Forbes, the cloud computing market is projected to reach $411 billion (approx. AUD $550 billion) by 2020. This indicates that the cloud industry is thriving across the globe at a significant rate as the global trend has been shifted to cloud-based services due to increased flexibility, and collaboration, improved network security protocols that they offer, which has ultimately increased the demand for SaaS software worldwide. According to Forrester, SaaS has the fastest revenue growth of any tech category, which is increasing at over 20% per year. This indicates that introduction and adoption of processing and storage technologies, especially SaaS has helped triggered the growth of the technology sector at par.

This makes it feel safe to say that SaaS model is likely to be a strategic move for software companies looking to grow in the future fuelled by the factors like continuous improvement, demonstrable ROI, and quality of staff collaboration in the global high tech sector. SaaS platforms are increasingly providing a combination of back-end automation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) within their platforms to increase the level of productivity. Something that traditional enterprise desktop client applications have not historically provided.

Although cloud computing adoption, particularly SaaS may seem easy at first glance, it is significantly more complex in nature than we can initially imagine particularly when evaluated in terms of data security and sovereignty, along with data management and system integration and other similar aspects. Without a doubt, cloud computing is of growing interest to high tech companies around the globe, but there are many challenges, obstacles and greater costs involved in cloud computing adoption, which companies are marginally exposed to.

So, the question here arises, whether cloud computing, particularly SaaS fulfills all the promises to costs, data security and sovereignty, return on investment, performances, and integration with existing IT infrastructure and system software? In your environment, SaaS may be the perfect solution for you to host your sensitive data and information on the cloud or outside your premises. The adoption of SaaS should never be based on its growing influence in the information technology industry. It should rather be based on your evolving software needs in accordance with the result of a very well informed analysis.

What Is Driving The Shift To The Cloud-Based Technologies?

The concept of more collaborative, “virtual environment” is what drives the shift to SaaS technology. As the cloud continues to dominate the industry with an exceptional margin, the need for companies to cultivate a culture of the collaborative workplace has grown to become the defining principle for sustaining the competitive advantage over others and remaining in the industry for long. This indicates that companies now need to offer their employees easy and flexible access to superior technology like SaaS if they expect to maneuver their business operations brilliantly and stay effective for long. Healthcare is one particular industry that has greatly been influenced by SaaS technology, which has further empowered the consumers to access more vital information and data with ease.

A Dramatic Shift from Traditional Software to the SaaS Technology!

According to Gartner, SaaS global revenue is expected to cross USD $70 billion (approx. AUD $94 billion) mark in 2018. The reason why its adoption is increasing at a significant rate is that SaaS solutions are engineered to be client-focused and are delivering and yielding greater business outcomes than traditional software. This indicates that professionals need not purchase expensive software applications, which takes a lot of time and mental efforts when installing. SaaS enables companies to work in a virtual, flexible, and reliable cloud environment, which help them focus more on their core or front-end business operations. A traditional software largely varies in prices depending on your business needs, however, normally it costs you around USD $350 (approx. AUD $470) or more. On the contrary, SaaS services have a minimal monthly or yearly subscription fee, which is affordable for SMEs to get instant access to all the applications they require.

Broadly, there are six pricing strategies on which costs of SaaS services are based; penetration pricing, skimming pricing, prestige pricing, free trial pricing, cost-plus pricing and value-based pricing. In order to find the right price for SaaS services, companies need to make a realistic analysis of their demand and then decide on which one choose from as they all have varying prices.

Bottom Line

Undeniably, the world is moving to SaaS and many private and publically owned companies, corporations, agencies are beginning to adopt the use of this technology. SaaS is cost-effective, scalable, reliable, which ultimately delivers high-performance results and increases the productivity of employees in IT teams. Although email, MS Project, Word, Excel, PowerPoint appears to remain core desktop applications, its integration with SaaS and tools like ERP, CRM, EPMO that need a higher degree of collaboration with static content/information for governance purposes continues to be another driving factor for using SaaS platforms.

The current SaaS model is an improved version of ASP-hosted and managed business applications (an application service provider or ASP is a business providing computer-based services to customers over a network; it allows customers to gain access to a particular software application using a standard protocol such as HTTP or CRM), which makes it uncover new opportunities in SaaS.

In the quest for easy and robust software, companies now acquire cost-effective yet reliable SaaS software and services to up their game in the field of information technology. Moreover, companies now strive to create a culture of the collaborative workplace, where their employees feel more confident about their work and have an easy access to company’s vital information, which makes SaaS a growing appetite of businesses and undeniable an ongoing championing of the platform in the BUA space.

Reference Links


http://www.smith-howard.com/resources/articles/software-service-trends-what-software-companies-need-know

https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3815165

https://dzone.com/articles/saas-vs-asp-%E2%80%93-understanding

https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2017/10/18/cloud-computing-market-projected-to-reach-411b-by-2020/#5464356b78f2