Four ERP Consultants, Aditi, Bharat, Charles and Dinesh are sitting around a coffee table and having (what else!!) fruit juices and discussing about which activity, in their opinion, is the most important activity in an ERP Implementation.
"I think requirement gathering is the most important activity in an ERP implementation" started Aditi. "If you take the correct requirements, your project is half done. Requirement gathering is the first and the most challenging task in an ERP Implementation. If you get it wrong, your entire project will suffer"
" I partly agree and partly disagree with Aditi" said Bharat, the most experienced of them all, "If you do not get the requirements correctly, project is doomed, I agree. But even if you get the requirements correctly, if you goof up on the design of the application, your project will be doomed"
Charles, who was silent so long, piped up. "You guys seem to have forgotten the configuration aspect. If you bungle on requirement gathering, you can bounce back later in the project, you still have time. Same is the case with design. You will definitely get time to rework on your design. But configuration is a different cup of tea. If you make a mistake in the configuration, and if that turns out to be one of those non-reversible configurations, then you have no way to turn back"
"Most of the configurations are editable. And the ones that are non-editable have some trigger events like entering transactions, before they become non-editable. To that extent, you can recover from a wrong configuration. However, in my opinion, the most important activity is the Data Conversion. Once you get your opening balances wrong in the ERP system, there is little that you can do to reverse the same. Also, once you get one data wrong, it has a cascading impact on other data. Most of the time, after the data conversion, you will find that your trial balance is filled with unwanted accounting entries and tracking and reversing them is a herculean task. Once your opening balances are wrong, you are kind of stuck to it for a long time. So in my opinion, entering correct Opening Balances is the most important activity in a project. " Concluded Dinesh, the most vocal of them.
Who do you agree with? Do you agree with Aditi or Bharat or Charles or Dinesh? Or do you have a different perspective.
That is the question for today's poll.
In case you do not agree with any one, tell me why.
1 comment:
Results of the poll are out. Two people voted for the poll. One was in favor of 'Requirement Gathering' as the most important activity in an ERP implementation, whereas, the other was in favor of 'Data Conversion' as the most important activity.
Based on my experience as a consultant, I will tend to agree with Dinesh. I think that Data Conversion is the most important activity in an ERP implementation. This is because, the converted data is your main deliverable as a consultant. If you goof up, your implementation will face the repercussions for times to come.
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