ERP or enterprise resource planning the syllables which these days became an inevitable next for integrating businesses in any organisation irrespective of its size, scope and scale with which it operates, half of the time comes cropper if we read the history of this big beast and stories of its unleashing in different industries (more in fortune biggies rather than MSMEs).
So it will be always risky venture if we put our key processes or the core business modules fully captive to this beast and let it be gone haywire with irreversible, and irrecoverable damage once failed. Yes the solution covers or demands to cover each and every business process, impounding the best knowledge , importing the best practices from its repository of experiences and exposures. Yes it also demands to be a transformative tool and mostly revolutionary rather than evolutionary and in all these claim lies the nemesis of the implementation which just depends with n number of variables controllable or uncontrollable. Top management support unconditional and uninterrupted , definite and distinct goals with objective framework as expected from the implementation , section of the software and its vendor with smooth knowledge osmosis with the organisational teams , followed by a stream of activities in change management, training and tutoring of the solution , acclimatizing the ground level users with the new environment , so all these critical success factors which not necessarily lie in the control either in individual capacity or more so in its causality , the ESS induced steroid may simply lead to your immune deficiency syndrome. And we must appreciate that any induced solution or serum just set the structural change in our body which needs to grow both compatibility and compliability. So all those business process reengineering, configuration or customisation of core activities will lead to this condition which normally becomes point of no return.
Especially when we never care (either being carried away by fashion or compelled by force) for the strategic fit for the solution architecture with organisation architecture and governance between the two entities (the organisation and ERP both), the risk of mismatch and so the miscarriage will be always higher. Now big bang approach may simply boomerang and the phased approach may just protract the process with irrational expectation confronted with mounting frustration. In such case it will be always safer and sometime great saver not to discard all the legacies and digress to the new environment outright, rather to keep some parallel process (with its IT enabler) running simultaneously specifically which is revenue centre or the core business process developed with some signature design exclusively by the culture, code and the creativity of the company. This process enabling software or the technology must be kept and nurtured with same care and concern the way new ERP solution is implemented. This signature process enabled by technology may be customer relationship, sale automation or supply chain which normally locate it in the bigger canvas of enterprise solution or ERP –II(as Gartner says) and which perennially bolt in to the other process in the industry by data warehousing application, web portal or customer related solution(analytics etc.). Now the equation of the old signature process with new vanilla system must be decided depending on how the organisation really want to hedge the risk of future failure if any in ERP.
