The business world is filled with unknowns. The rise and fall of the economy, changing regulations, and the shifting needs of your customers constantly keep your business success—or at least its optimization—in question. The importance of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system amid this environment is hard to overstate and just as hard to have a real sense of your success when upgrading or replacing your ERP software. While you’re certain that it’s expensive and new, how can you be certain that you’ve made an improvement in your latest ERP decisions? Part of the answer is to let the right people in the company choose the right metrics.
ERP MEASUREMENT: TALK TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Given the size and complexity of any ERP decision, the temptation will be for managers alone to decide how to evaluate the power and utility of the new system or upgrade, but this is partly wrong-headed because it denies the genius of the workers in their own tasks. A manager’s genius, when properly used, is to see a bigger picture and see the connections that make a company work. That insight, that understanding, then can be brought to bear on any new interdepartmental features that were specifically selected in this new ERP or upgrade and thereby inform any metric of success. Presumably, these new features were selected to smooth interaction, increase inefficiency, or add interaction between departments and managers should shape the metrics to evaluate those abilities.
The worker, struggling with specific headaches and knowledgeable in specific tasks, is in a key position to evaluate task-by-task impact of the new/upgraded enterprise resource planning system. Any savvy business would have already had employee input concerning the tasks and processes that are languishing under over-complexity, useless redundancy, lack of automation, and so on. Going to the workers, people hired for their expertise in a given task or field, and seeking their detailed knowledge of weak business processes and vibrant efficiencies that can be preserved informs any ERP’s evaluation.
By sharing perspectives top to bottom, manager and workers can shape a metric that covers the large and the small, the month to month and the day to day. As managers, you are always at risk of your self-satisfaction blinding you to the wisdom of your subordinates. But as a manager, you hired these people. To deny their expertise now is to deny your own genius and let one of the most expensive and important business decisions go forth with only luck as your guide.
Next time, we’ll talk about preparing for the metric and allowing your company enough time to gather its wits.