Purchasing a new grower ERP software system is a very big decision and will have a significant organization and financial impact on your business.

As a grower, there are some things you can do to de-risk the decision and prepare for better outcomes. These are things within your control that are best done by your team along with adequate external consulting.

Identify Your System Roles

Think of a role as the ‘who’ that gets things done in a particular business function.

For example, you may have a purchasing agent that handles getting supplier quotes, placing purchase orders, and receiving shipped goods or dealing with supplier credit requests. This would be a role of the purchasing agent.

A Role in a system determines permissions for certain transaction capability (such as creating a work order) or security setup (allowing a new user access) or making approvals of other requests.

Think about all the potential roles in your business, from purchasing to production planning to inventory management, shipping, accounting, and other roles are all there to perform specific tasks in the system. This is where talking to the department managers can help identify these explicit and implicit roles in your organization and help with planning a transition.

Getting a high-level idea of the correct roles your business needs will speed implementation discussions and ultimately, when implemented properly, improve the security of your system.

Map Your Business Processes

The processes are the ‘what’ that gets the work done. A business process is the specific set of steps (tasks) and actors (roles) that accomplish a given function within your business.

Most processes for your business exist in your employees’ brains. Few businesses take the time to document how they get each task’s work done. Ultimately, when changes come to your business or employees move on not having this information centrally stored creates a succession problem.

Knowing your processes, especially for key tasks you expect a new ERP system to help with is crucial to do before talking to the sales rep. This gives you an edge in knowing more clearly what you need to do as you exist today. As you evaluate new systems you can more clearly identify gaps in offered functionality versus what your business needs.

Current flows for your most crucial business will reveal deficiencies and gaps more precisely in any new system evaluation and give your potential vendor a much better understanding of your needs. All of which will drive you toward a more successful implementation.

Document Your Data Model

Whether you have used just Excel and QuickBooks or you have a multi-million dollar ERP system you have a data model – you may not know what that looks like.

A data model is a high-level document that shows what data is used for each area (process) of your business. The data model can also show how or who generates data and who consumes it. Additionally, it can show the physicality of your data – i.e., what system or format it lives in.

The actual data your operation uses can take many forms. It can be item related data, customer data, sales order data, pricing, etc.

All the different facets of your organizational data need to be documented to see how your current operational need maps to what any new system would provide.

An up-to-date data model will reduce the implementation planning time as well as speed the onboarding of your key data into the new system.

Conclusion

Taking the time and effort to document these crucial areas before you engage with the ERP software sales and implementation process can save a lot of headache and heartache during the implementation. It will help you evaluate offerings more clearly and know with better precision gaps in functionality that your business needs.

How We Can Help

Advanced Grower Solutions can help you work through the process of assessing your current situation, and help you document these areas, thus preparing you for engaging with the sales process. We can also help in the selection and implementation of systems as an independent resource working for you to get the best outcome. Contact us to learn more.