We’re Live with ERP! Now What?

Over the past few years, my ERP consulting emphasis has shifted all the more from purely helping clients attempting to implement ERP to helping those who already have it get more value from their investments. During the down economy of 2000 to 2003, installed base clients simply froze and made little to no investment. By 2004, pent up demand finally led to new investments in upgrades, business process improvement, and extended applications.

This time around, despite the financial downturn, I find many clients who are interested in investing to address the downturn. The most popular subject is building a Center of Excellence. In brief, an ERP Center of Excellence is an organization, whether actual or virtual, that drives business process improvement on a continuous basis with ERP as the enabler. The reason clients turn to this activity is because within three years after their initial go-live, they find that they are only making incremental gains with their ERP investments. A Center of Excellence turns those gains into something more dramatic and helps promote business and IT alignment.

The very best practice is to begin planning a Center of Excellence before going live. I currently have a client that is in the implementation planning stage and the resource planning (including in-house staff, a systems integration partner, and a collection of independent consultants) is being done to provide with full Center of Excellence capability when the implementation project begins. Thus, when the client goes live, the transition from project to deployment will be all the smoother.

This is an excellent practice that I first observed back in 2001 at Delta Airlines, where, unlike the vast majority of SAP clients, they took a long-term view rather than simply race to go-live as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Creating and sustaining a Center of Excellence is not easy, most especially if your firm implemented ERP long ago. The longest chapter of my new book (The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live, http://www.michaeldoane.com/The_SAP_Green_Book.html), is on this subject which is actually at the core of nearly all post-implementation issues.

To learn more about a Center of Excellence, feel free to contact me at michael@michaeldoane.com and/or download my 42 page white paper: Thrive After Go-Live, A Practical Blueprint for Managing the SAP Life Cycle.

Michael Doane is a consultant and industry analyst with 35 years of enterprise applications experience. He is the author of The New SAP Blue Book, a Concise Business Guide to the World of SAP and The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live. He can be reached at michael@michaeldoane.com