We spoke last week about ensuring your critical business processes are not interrupted during an ERP implementation. That is information we make clear to our clients by providing a staffing plan that for both our resources and their resources. We break this down by phase, position, and role so they have that visibility of who will be needed and how much will be needed, so they are prepared for the staffing replacement model that works best for their organization. This is critical to success with ERP, either on premise or cloud.
An additional thing about the cloud is that you almost need people with enough flexibility of thought to say well, even though we've done it this way for the last 10 years, can you show me a different way? It's not how we do things right now, but it can improve moving forward with a certain level of seniority and skill and expertise involved. Quite frankly, flexibility of mind is being able to say I'm not going to do it the way I was before but everything will still work out for the organization.
These project can often have conflicting business objectives and projects. As we've gone through these projects in the last however many years, especially with customers transitioning from on premise to cloud, there have been challenges in terms of what organizations are dealing with. This can be either in terms of resource assignment or technical capabilities or things like process changes or data issues. What we've seen and try to establish early in the project is a clear understanding of what organizational constraints are from concurrent projects. For example, if there is an ERP implementation happening at the same time as a licensing and permit system or tax system, the executive leadership involved in making critical decisions is now distracted even though the core users are different departments and different organizations.
One of the most important things we do in our implementations is to identify which projects are mission critical, understand those that are currently underway, and find out if any are positioned to launch during the implementation. It goes back to making sure the necessary resources are available, they're not distracted, and they're able to spend as much time as they can on the implementation.
