Well, it’s been six months and you are dying to measure the success of your new or recently upgraded enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Yes, you’ve called some of the IT guys in and now you want to talk about a system of metrics that will reveal where the new software is batting a 1000 and where it’s striking out. Unfortunately, you’ve started too late and not six months too late. Your deeply probing metrics should have been taking shape as soon as you started shopping for an upgrade or entirely new ERP.
ERP SUCCESS: WANT DID YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?
As your wish list grew when you were shopping for a new ERP or when considering new modules in the upgrade, you were already building expectations, and therefore the foundation for any metric for ERP success. As you gathered input from departments, managers, and individual workers, you metric was always growing and the savvy will learn to take note months in advance.
Since the purpose of upgrading or replacing an ERP is to improve your business’s performance, you’d better know how you were performing initially. In each area you hope the ERP will improve, you need to have a track record of those areas. Whether it’s procurement orders placed, invoices processed, or what have you, you need a baseline to judge improvement.
As we discussed in our last article, you hopefully talked to your workers about problem areas in daily operations. Some of these issues may be resolved in a statistical metric, others may require a questionnaire to see if the ERP addressed the concerns of the boots on the ground. Remember that your workers’ day-to-day is your dollars and cents.
Of course, you can’t evaluate the new system fifteen minutes after implementation. Your metric will be useless if you don’t give the new system time to be adopted, embraced, and have its bugs ironed out. By the same token, don’t evaluate the system just once a few months out. Two or three evaluations of a system spaced several months apart can show trends both in improvements and where persistent problems may remain.
Your ERP system has a lot of hands in a lot of cookie jars. Keeping it current is important, but so is knowing whether it’s meeting your expectations.
We hope you enjoyed this 3 part series on measuring your ERP success. Feel free to contact an ECI representative LIVE for more information on improving your ERP experience, we’re here to help!