10 Reasons ERP Consulting Drives Grower Software System Transition Success

Let’s say you’re a decent-sized or larger grower needing to upgrade your software systems.

For a grower that is using various legacy or multiple tools for planning, production, inventory, sales, accounting, EDI, and other tools, successfully making a transition to new system(s) can be a risky and daunting task. Our industry is replete with stories of implementations gone bad for a myriad of reasons.

Simultaneously running the business and planning, designing, learning, testing, and migrating to a whole new system with new processes can be very difficult.

You can increase the odds of success greatly in your ERP software system search and implementation by bringing independent consultants to provide additional resources for these key functions. Your employees will be happier, and the system selection and implementation will be aligned to your needs.

There are several ways outside consulting helps increase the ROI of your ERP software system transition.  

An independent advocate for your business

The vendor wants to make the sale. Their internal bias is for making the sale. Their quarterly focus is making the sale. Their yearly bonus requires making the sale. The vendor sales teams are implicitly biased to advocate for themselves no matter what they verbalize. Many times, the sales team is not around post go-live when the tough problems invariably pop up. And the sales team has spent 0 hours operating your business.

An experienced technically competent independent consulting effort can turn the tables and advocate for your business and focus on how a system will meet your needs and what its true costs of ownership will likely be. They can operate unbiased from the sale of a particular system and can help more independently assess a particular vendors sales offering against your needs. They can help document and track agreements and when specific milestones are met by the vendor helping you to a high-quality implementation.

De-risk your plan and investment

Large scale system changes are fraught with many types of risk. Monetary, operational, data integrity and schedule are just a few types of risk that occur and must be assessed and mitigated.

Independent consultants can help identify and implement ways to de-risk your migration. Vetting vendors and software claims, testing, and working with your staff to define your business requirements and processes.

A consultant with an outside perspective can raise warning flags and provide the difficult feedback to help avoid software death marches or falling victim to things like sunk cost fallacies.

Building your business requirements

One of the most important preparation steps in a system transition is a thorough mapping document of your business needs and requirements. This becomes an important guidepost for judging various vendor proposals.

The problem with relying on your internal staff is that they already know your business so well they will implicitly walk over details that will be important to new systems. It is a familiarity paradox. That is where an independent consultant – new to your business but experienced in the industry, can come in and help detail these nuances, ask the questions to reveal hidden requirements, and work to clarify the more complete definition of the business need. And that will help yield better selection and implementation criteria.

Mapping your data and processes

Each vendor you work with will certainly know (usually) how their systems work and how their data is modeled. What they don’t know is the details and nooks and crannies of your data and process needs and requirements.

Preparing for a new system implementation is in large part a giant mapping effort and gap analysis. The mapping is mapping your operational needs, data, and functionality required to what a given vendor’s system offers.

There will also be a large data conversion to get your items and associated metadata as well as any historical transactions needed into the new system format. Our team has many internal tools and capabilities to help make sure this process occurs smoothly and efficiently.

Broader view of implementation

An independent consultant can bring experience from other system implementations and other industries. In other words, they can bring a collection of ‘what not to do’ and ‘best practices’ that your individual vendor may be lacking. This can help better plan and execute your migration. This can yield a better coverage of planning, and potential issues to design around and can bring about a better outcome.

Consultants with experience in multiple systems with many grower types can more assiduously direct implementation planning leveraging the experience and expertise gained in past engagements.

Help sort out sales promises from true reality

Too many times salespeople use terms that, in the mind of the grower imply one thing but, can mean something totally different.

For example, when a software salesperson says ‘It can do that’ the grower thinks ‘ok. it does that’. However, in many cases what ‘it can do that’ means is ‘we have internal programmers who can augment the existing functionality to do that in a few months for hourly rates above the fees we have quoted you’. The salesperson is projecting the future based on the capability of their team and the tool set they use instead of stating the present. Without experience it is easy to miss these subtle distinctions in meaning.

The grower must listen carefully to the vendors and know where these ‘soft and squishy’ phrases are to make sure that the understanding of the grower team matches the current reality of their system capability.  An independent consulting presence can really help in this phase of the process as you vet vendors to identify these areas and push to get a real assessment of existing capability instead of what may exist in the future.

Your IT and teams will be pulled in too many directions to effectively lead the effort

Running these key departments to support ongoing business at the same time you are working on the specifications, and design requirements and validation of a new system creates opposing goals for these teams.

And when the stuff hits the fan ongoing operational needs always trump planning/designing for new systems. This means that critical elements of the preparation for your new system are short-changed. This will happen many times and result in missed requirements that will lead to failures and issues post go live.

It is better to have independent consultants lead the effort in direct conjunction with your management team. Therefore, work on the system implementation timeline can continue in many cases when the operational teams have other daily pressing issues to attend to.

Testing the implementation more thoroughly

Once requirements are known and business processes are defined (redefined) then a period of functional validation is necessary. This is the time when you enter and allow the various data and transactions to flow through the system and validate each step and the resulting records, data or results.

This is a hard part of any migration plan because you are testing permutations of potential errors. Without this phase, you are left to your users ‘catching’ things while the system is live, leading to improper operations, bad data, and potentially bad decisions.

An independent consultant can help build a thorough testing plan to validate vendor claims, system setup, and your specific transactional requirements. This will involve the use of your existing departments and resources to participate when their area is involved.

Assessing scale in your environment

As you go from system functional validation to going live and using the new system full scale you can run into performance problems that were unforeseen or unplanned for.

An important aspect of planning your migration is assessing the scale of performance your operation will need. This would be indicated by such things as the number of users needed, the number of items/SKUs supported, the number of transactions, the amount of historical data and other similar measures.

Aspects of scale need to be considered and analyzed early on in your planning and requirements phase. As this can rule out systems that won’t scale and set the stage for where the system needs to be running for you in say 3-5 years (or whatever your specific timeframe is).

Independent resources can help verify vendor claims and aid in testing scenarios for performance validation.

Helping define a realistic implementation

Most folks are optimists about things they know deeply. And your staff, who knows your systems intimately, will tend to underestimate what it takes to get things done in a new system due to their unfamiliarity with it. They will inherently estimate the new system effort by proxying from the old systems.

Current staff will not account for the longer time frame to learn new systems nor the impact that normal daily operations will impact their availability for the new project.

Many vendors, not knowing or having visibility to your business needs and timing will not be able to set realistic schedules. In fact, many will implicitly allow the progress on the migration to be full driven and dictated by the grower’s staff availability. This, while maybe in good intention, will lead to long delays in being ready to go live and it will raise overall system implementation costs lengthening the time from investment to return.

External consultants can approach these issues with a less biased assessment of what it takes and therefore help the grower to define and set more attainable goals for the implementation.

Conclusion

Certainly, adding independent consultation will add upfront costs. These are typically a small fraction of the total cost of ownership of new complex system. These upfront costs can be looked at to mitigate risk, add advocacy, insight, and resources, and help drive toward successful long-term use and return of your system.

Advanced Grower Solutions provides consulting services. These are not veiled attempts to sell our products. I will freely admit when my software doesn’t meet grower needs and in our consultative sales process, we will let you know what as soon as we understand that.

However, since we have worked with hundreds of growers of different types over many years and we have done system implantations as well as long-term post-go-live support, AGS is in a unique position to bring an independent view to help drive your system implementation to fruitful completion.

Contact us today to learn more about our consulting services.