One of the situations that we face with most of our clients is overworked teams.
Teams in all functional areas are swamped with regular work and they have no time to take on the additional burden of working with ERP implementation partners or ERP business consultants to develop systems for ERP.
While the large companies can form a team specifically for ERP implementation, the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) do not have this luxury. They are forced to work with existing staff. Most of the staff may not have experience working with ERPs.
The situation becomes worse when the assignment is started closer to the year-end when the teams are already swamped with work.
We are in the process of getting an ERP implemented in an engineering company with a large item list. The company wanted to move from legacy systems to top-of-the-line ERP for smaller companies.
The objective of the customer was to improve efficiency in material planning, procurement, tracking of material in different production stages, and eliminating waste. The customer wanted to implement ERP in three months to start the new financial year in ERP.
The only challenge was that the company had also received a large order from a customer warranting 24*7 operations.
The production target for the Production Department and the Production Planning Department (PPC) for March was the same as the target for a quarter in a slightly leaner period. This not only stressed the Production and PPC team but also teams in procurement, stores, and logistics.
The client’s team was under tremendous pressure to deliver on both counts and felt overwhelmed. To add to the work pressure was the worry that ERP will make things more complicated. Some of the senior managers were also concerned about the lack of computer culture in the organization with data being captured on paper.
Our learnings from the assignment were
1. Listen, acknowledge and engage
The CEO or the Founders should listen to the team and acknowledge that the team is overworked. Pushing the team or being aggressive with the team will be counter-productive. ERP Consultants can facilitate discussions with the CEO and the team to have a realistic assessment of the workload of the team. ERP consultants and the team have to collaborate and cooperate. Undue pressure from CEOs on the team may result in resentment of the team blowing on consultants and affecting the relationship.
2. Be Realistic
Develop a realistic detailed implementation plan based on availability and the expected contribution from different team members. Prioritize the work for example which modules have to be implemented first, the data that needs to be collected first. This allows some of the constraints or deadlines to be met with. For example, with our client, since March 31st was important for financial transactions, we prioritized it.
3. Broaden the membership of the team
Instead of working with the ideal team members, work with other teams that may be able to support the implementation. Since the production team was busy meeting the production order, we worked extensively with members of the Production Planning and Control and Design team members.
4. Divide and integrate
Break the work into individual and group activities. For example, while we collected the data and interviewed departments on an individual basis to understand and document existing processes, the validation and bouncing off ideas were conducted in group activities with persons from all the departments present.
5. Extend the team
a. Use internal resources.
Channelize the younger members of the team. They have more energy and are also eager to learn. Implementation of ERP offers a challenging opportunity that most youngsters are willing to contribute. The youngsters also come with newer ideas.
b. Delegate to ERP Consultants.
Use ERP Consultants and their teams to delegate and take up some of the work. For example, once the structure of the codes is finalized. Let the ERP consultants develop codes for all the items. The developed codes can be reviewed and finalized by a person from PPC or Production or Stores.
Another example of this is the testing of configured software. Use the ERP Consultant’s team for the first level of testing configured modules. Once the ERP consultant’s teams approve and have ensured that the changes have been incorporated by ERP Implementer, the users can test that software and provide their feedback.
The final testing can also be done by the ERP consultants at the first level. Another advantage of this is a reduction in frustration levels of employees of the companies who can provide value-added inputs.
c. Hire temporary resources.
Depending on the budget of the client, hire some junior members temporarily or sub-contract. For example, temporary resources can be hired for reconciliation of old accounts, cleaning up of data, data entry, etc. Where ever possible use of software tools can be used for digitizing and cleaning data. Like the use of OCR software for digitizing data on hard copies.
Most founders and CEOs fail to recognize that ERP implementation is a lot of drudge work and may take a significant amount of time for the team. The effort is most often under-estimated and under-valued.