Successful ERP Implementation Best Practices Guide

How do you implement ERP software successfully? What are the most important variables to control when implementing ERP software? What makes or breaks an ERP implementation?

In this article, we'll discuss some of the most important factors involved in ensuring your enterprise resource planning software implementation is a success.

ERP Implementation Business Case

Ensuring a successful ERP implementation starts with fully understanding why your organisation is implementing an ERP system in the first place.

For some organisations, it can help them to achieve other strategic goals such as geographic expansion or successful integration of a new acquisition. For other organisations, a successful ERP implementation allows them to create new efficiencies that enable them to increase their bottom line.

Whatever your goal is, you need to ensure that you, your project team, ERP vendor and ERP systems integrator understand the key business drivers. These business drivers then need to be at the front and centre of every decision you make when evaluating, selecting and implementing your new ERP software.

Building a business case should be the first thing you do when considering ERP change. At ERP Research, we have hand crafted an ERP business case that has been used by hundreds of organisations around the world. You can download it for free here.

ERP Requirements

When we discuss the failure of ERP projects with business leaders, it almost always comes down to a lack of understanding between project stakeholders on the requirements of the ERP project. In many cases, labelling an ERP project a failure is unfair; the reality is that the project was more complex than anticipated due to a lack of clarity around the actual business and ERP requirements.

That's why a crucial part of implementing a new ERP system successfully is documenting your ERP requirements in detail as early as possible. This enables a successful ERP implementation by ensuring all stakeholders — including your people and your systems integrator — are clear on what needs to be delivered and can price in the effort and software required.

Building your ERP requirements can take several weeks or months depending on the size or complexity of your organisation.

You can also reduce your ERP requirements building timescale by using our free ERP requirements template.

Once your requirements are signed off, you'll need an end-to-end implementation plan to deliver against them. Our ERP implementation project plan template gives you a working Gantt-style structure — phases, owners, gates, dependencies — so your project team, vendor and systems integrator are all working from the same baseline from day one.

Building A Successful ERP Implementation Team

People are a key facet of a successful ERP implementation. Without the right people supporting your ERP project, you're bound to fail.