What makes a good ERP implementation partner?
The good ERP partner puts themselves in the customer’s shoes
“The good ERP supplier sets off in the customer’s situation and strategy, and puts the customer’s, not their own, interests first”
Mette Ohmsen has been involved in digital transformations for twenty-five years and most recently for several large ERP implementations. She started as a program manager on the supplier side at Columbus and then as program director on the customer side for a very large ERP implementation with Norlys. She is now, via her own company FNF1, providing consulting and advisory services in this area.
Mette Ohmsen prioritizes the strategic, organizational, and human aspects of the implementation while ensuring that there is also focus on improvements to processes, data, and security, instead of just the classical focus on functional requirements. She believes that when a company is faced with the much-feared ERP implementation, it should be recognized and tackled as a change project.
“It’s a big misunderstanding to focus so much on being ‘on time’, ‘on scope’ and ‘on budget’ when describing the success and failure of ERP projects. First and foremost, the project must be ‘on purpose’.”
Go for ‘on purpose’ in an ERP implementation
“You learn a lot along the way, and ‘things happen.’ This you need to embrace and be able to adapt. ‘Time, scope, budget’ are parameters that must be in control, and that you must also realize can, and usually ‘will,’ evolve during the implementation,” Mette Ohmsen says.
“It’s not just a new IT system to replace the old one, that you are implementing. There’s much, much more to it. It’s new technology that enables better business processes and data insights, enhancing the company’s competitiveness and enabling employees to better perform their tasks – IF you understand how to leverage the capabilities and realize the benefits through a good implementation”.
For the project to stay “on purpose,” it is crucial that the preparation for the ERP implementation is done with the right aim – and that this aim is not lost during the implementation process!
The implementation partner must help the customer establish the right framework for the full scope of the project. Here, Mette Ohmsen raises a red flag about the classic requirement specifications for the future system, which are often used in the quotation phase.
“A requirements specification quickly becomes all about all the functional requirements, and it easily tends to be based on the perceived existing needs – the way things are done now (because that was how they were done yesterday) – instead of focusing on the business desires for future development and the opportunities the implementation offers,” says Mette Ohmsen.
Choose the solutions that best support your strategy
“When switching to a different or newer version of your ERP platform, you should be open to the fact that things can be done better and not just think ‘replace old with new.’”
“You need to choose the solutions that you expect to best support the business in the future from a strategic perspective. The company should become more competitive from the overall ERP implementation, and the employees should have the overall experience of a change for the better. When I emphasize ‘overall,’ it’s because there will almost always be some trade-offs in an ERP implementation,” says Mette Ohmsen.
“The most expensive thing is not execution. It’s the conflicts. And they can be reduced with the right partner.”
The good ERP supplier, in Mette Ohmsen’s interpretation, is characterized by thoroughly understanding the customer’s business, including its strategies. Combining this insight with the supplier’s own expert knowledge of the many features and capabilities in the new ERP systems, and other apps and business solutions, the ERP supplier should help the customer design the project to provide the greatest possible business value moving forward.
A good supplier will not take on tasks that they are not qualified or positioned to handle and has above all the customer’s best interests in mind, and not their own.
“During the implementation, there will be a need for many adjustments to the project”, Mette Ohmsen emphasizes. This is because many of the assumptions and prerequisites on which the project was based will turn out to be insufficient or plainly wrong.
Furthermore, there will be development in and changes to technology, the company’s own business, project participants, etc. Also, it is not until the team has worked on the project and with the system for a while that the complexity of it all – processes, data connections and diverse interests, fully unfolds.
The planning of the project, including its timeline, must consider how to accommodate the need to meet changes along the way. The introduction of AI and the paradigm shift it brings to a wide range of disciplines is a good example of how quickly you need to be ready to adapt.
Five Criteria for a Good ERP Partner
1. Experience
“I often see that customers, blinded by self-awareness insist that the supplier’s consultants must have specific industry experience. While this requirement in a few cases may be crucial, there is a greater risk that it prevents the customer from getting the actual best-suited consultant.
Personally, I believe it’s more important to seek the highest level of expertise in the specific ERP process area such as ‘Warehouse’ or ‘Purchasing,’ and benefit from the experience of a consultant who has worked on various types of implementations.
However, this experience should ideally also include full life-cycle implementations in companies of a similar size and type: Manufacturing, retail, or for example, a regulated industry that has very specific requirements for system validation etc. If you can get superman, you take him! But until then, most companies can safely move the desire for industry experience a bit down the list of priorities.”
2. ”Chemistry”
“It has a lot to do with simply feeling good about the relationship. You need to speak the same ‘language.’ The customer must feel understood and prioritized, and the good ERP supplier both supports and challenges the customer in a constructive manner – in fact, this behavior and feeling should be vice versa.”
3. Resources
“A good ERP implementation partner will tell their customer that the project they are about to embark on will require a lot of internal resources and that an ERP project is not something you can just buy as a take-home meal,” says Mette Ohmsen.
The size of the supplier is less important to many customers. The larger players may seem attractive because of their resource pool, so the customers think that it will be easy for the supplier to simply change a team resource on request. However, all (the best) of the supplier’s employees will almost always be allocated to other customers, so the ability to make replacements may appear better than it actually is.
It is, however, important that the supplier – e.g., through partnerships – can cover the geographies and understand the organizational cultures involved in the implementation.
It is crucial that the implementation partner understands and is able to cover the customer’s needs for services in the operational phase. In most of the larger implementations, ‘Operations’ often runs in parallel with project activities, introducing a special complexity to the governance and the change, test, and release management processes around the system.”
4. Competencies
“Most partners are very skilled and have the relevant expertise when it comes to systems and solutions. However, it’s just as important to be able to put yourself in the customer’s place. It’s all very Søren Kirkegaard-ish, but it’s crucial to understand where the customer is at – to understand and start from the customer’s point of view if you want to bring yourself into a position where you’re in fact able to help them.”
5. Partner mindset
It’s about the ability to establish and enforce a strong sense of common ground and community with the customer throughout the project.
“The partner mindset means genuinely caring about the other party’s interests – and of course it has to go both ways to work. You should design the project, including the contracts, to minimize conflicts of interests instead of setting up ‘strong-arm’ and control mechanisms that, quite frankly, don’t make any sense in an efficient and effective execution of a project – or are even impossible to fulfill. Such mechanisms are also likely to motivate negative collaboration dynamics, which is the worst and extremely damaging to the chances for a successful project,” says Mette Ohmsen.
