Initial Education and Training.

Ideally 100 percent, a minimum of 80 percent, of all of the people in
the company need to receive some education on ERP as part of the
implementation process. For ERP to succeed, many things will have
to change, including the way that many people do their jobs—at all
levels in the company. People need to know what, why, and how these
changes will affect them. People need to see the reasons why they
should do their jobs differently and the benefits that will result. Remember
that skipping any or all of this step results in a bigger debt
later. Companies that short-change education and training almost
always find that they need to double back and do it right—after seeing
that the new processes aren’t working properly.
• Implementing Sales & Operations Planning.
Sales & Operations Planning, often called “top management’s
handle on the business,” is an essential part of ERP. In fact, it may be
the most important element of all. ERP simply won’t work well without
it. Because it involves relatively few people and does not take a
long time to implement, it makes sense to start this process early in
the ERP implementation and to start getting benefits from it well before
the other ERP processes are in place.
• Demand Management, Planning, and Scheduling Processes.
Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) balances demand and supply
at the volume level. Issues of mix—specific products, customers, orders,
equipment—are handled in the area of demand management,
planning, and scheduling.
Involved in this step of the Proven Path are two primary elements:
One is to develop and define the new approaches to be used in forecasting,
customer order entry, and detailed planning and scheduling.
The other is to implement these new processes via a pilot and a cutover
approach.
• Data Integrity.
ERP, to be successful, requires levels of data integrity far higher than
most companies have ever achieved—or even considered. Inventory
36 ERP: M I H
records, bills of material, formulas, recipes, routings, and other data
need to become highly accurate, complete, and properly structured.
• Finance and Accounting Processes—Process Definition and Implementation.
Financial and accounting processes must be defined and implemented
with the same rigor as the demand and planning processes.
But there’s good news here: For most companies, this step will be less
demanding and go more smoothly than dealing with demand management,
planning, and scheduling (facing). The reason is that the finance
and accounting body of knowledge is more mature, more
developed, better codified, and—most importantly—better understood
by more people.
• Software Selection, and Software Configuration Installation.
Companies that have already implemented an ES will find this step
to be relatively painless. There may be some additional “bolt-on”
software to acquire, but typically, these are not major stumbling
blocks. For companies doing a combined ERP/ES implementation,
these software steps are, of course, major and must be managed
very carefully to avoid having “the computer tail wag the
company dog.”