In the first of a series of posts by Mark Cooper, CEO of PM Eleven, we will outline what we believe are the essential guidelines for an Ellipse to SAP migration. Using our (PM Eleven team) extensive experience in SAP projects over more than 25 years, we will expose the key lessons learned for application to any Ellipse to SAP conversion.
Mandate
So, you are facing a major ERP/EAM change…
The key question before you even start is “have you really got a 100% mandate?”. The rusted-on Ellipse users are hard to budge, so you’ve got to put together a strong and clear vision which has the support of those Managers whose staff are most at risk to go, rogue.
Recently, we were engaged at a customer who had commenced an SAP Implementation Program replacing a combination of legacy systems. Given the program would fully transform the underlying business processes, the structure and construct of the organisation would fundamentally change also (i.e. roles, responsibilities, positions, services, etc).
Our role was to define the services strategy (future shared services, system functional coverage and best practices). What became fundamentally obvious from Day 1 was that they didn’t have a mandate!
Despite the CEO announcing the program, he didn’t really have his direct reports on board (and gave the impression he was side-betting, just in case it didn’t go well).
What was obvious to us was that the business was giving lip-service to the “mandate for change” and the “commitment to SAP”. Implementing any system (SAP included) cannot drag people to change business processes if they don’t want to, particularly if you open the window to accept rationally argued dissent.
In this case, business process owners had absolutely zero intention of changing their organisation (process, people, system) to align with the new world, yet the System Implementor (SI) was very happy to continue to build their numbers and were blindly creating an SAP environment with the intention of resetting business processes to align with the non-fully-ratified design.
If you haven’t convinced all managers and got their commitment (in the strongest possible terms) that this change will be supported and advocated by them, then STOP. You will save yourself a lot of time, energy and money (notwithstanding lose some good people along the way).
Needless to say, this customer finally realised they were on a hiding to nothing. They halted the program, lost a lot of credibility with their own stakeholders and finally many of the C suite moved on. Five years later, they probably have greater risks in their business and are still on the pathway to implementing a new ERP system (albeit with a larger hill to climb).
PM Eleven provides independent advice to secure success in your systems implementation and business improvement initiatives.
Final Thoughts
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