Nick Yates on Travel

As your business grows your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software may face growing capacity problems.

Where to go from there?  There are robust software options on the market designed for small, mid-sized and large companies — Microsoft’s Dynamics AX and Infor, to name two in the mid-sized range.  The Fortune 500 crowd may opt for truly heavyweight systems such as SAP or Oracle.

But to whichever solution your company turns, there will be conversion issues that many business will imperfectly come to grips with.  Starting off in-house.  No amount of reasoning is going to convince some hold-out staffers that they need to spend mega-hours learning some new system — and then to labor mightily to put it in place.  Also, the new system designated by management isn’t going to immediately win all hearts and minds.  There will be as many perceived benefits to alternative systems as there are hearts in your office to champion them.

And, sad to say, software salespersons sometimes exaggerate.  Really.  The ease with which your legacy systems will roll over into the new one may not (read will not) quite live up to pre-sale predictions.  Be ready for operational havoc — and have the foresight to plan conversions for the least busy part of the business quarter.

Make sure the vendor supplying the enterprise software assigns their top people to the account.  The last thing your company needs is to find itself paying top consultant dollars to train new consultants in the software they’re already supposed to know!  Have the names and requested hours of preferred consultants included in the purchase deal itself, just so there’s no misunderstanding about your expectations.

And get the consultants’ advice before attempting to customize the new system to better meet your needs.  Not every change you affect will sit well with the underlying program code.  Ditto for that legacy data you might be sorely tempted to blithely feed in without any serious second thoughts.  What’s the saying about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread?

And do keep in mind that the full advantages of modern enterprise systems only come to those prepared to winkle them out.  Remain alive to potentialities and open to learning about them.