Top 5 ERP News and Articles: Week 2019-3: Selected Articles

Disclaimer: The articles in this blogpost are those that I found interesting and relevant to the topic of ERP and broader technology. I have no commercial association with any of the entities mentioned in this article. I may be following a few of these entities on LinkedIn and even some of these entities may be on my LinkedIn or Social Media network. These articles are selected purely based on their relevance to the objective of this blog, to promote ERP.

Here are the top 5 ERP news and articles for the Week # 2019-3.

The science of cloud ERP utilization: By Brett Beaubouef: How do I know that my company is ready for ERP? How do I know which ERP features that I should implement immediately? Which ones should be implemented later? What could be the potential roadmap? Anyway I am investing in ERP, so why not implement all the features at one go and get it over with?

These are not theoretical questions. Many Organizations fail to realize that implementing ERP calls for evaluating many aspects. ERP calls for change. There are many aspects to change. Let us consider process changes that almost every ERP application expects. The word process change implies that the existing processes are documented and base-lined. If you don't know what to change, what will you change? Every organization is not ready for process changes. Availability of documented processes is a pre-requisite for process change.

Another aspect of change deals with Organizational Readiness for change. Are the people ready for change? Do the Organization have a habit of embracing change? If Organization is not ready for change, then ERP will be a failure since it brings about massive changes in Organizational Culture. 

In his blog  ERP the Right Way! ERP Blogger Brett Beaubouef attempts to bring about a statistical approach using multi-variate analysis to address these questions. As per him, ERP Utilization is dependent on Process readiness of the Organization as measured by CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integrated) and Change readiness as measured by OCC (Organizational Capacity to Change). Mr.Beaubouef expects a CMM Level of at least 3, which means that the Organizational process should  at the minimum be defined with reliable results. The linkage between OCC and ERP Utilization is linear. The higher the capacity to change, the higher the ERP Utilization will be.

How can Organizations improve ERP utilization? Mr.Beaubouef divides the changes to two groups. One is incremental changes, also known as quick wins. These could be introduction of an additional application or rolling out ERP to a new business unit. These should become a habit for Organizations.. The other type of changes are called as paradigm shifts, major changes like BPR or Cloud Migration. These should be introduced only once the process maturity and capacity to change improves. 

This article is a bit dated, posted in July 2017, but is very relevant for Organizations that have implemented ERP or are planning to do so.

How to find the best Independent ERP Consultants: By Eric Kimberling

I work as an independent ERP Consultant. I was intrigued by this article. I wanted to know if I met the criteria that will define an expert independent consultant. I think this article is very important for SMEs in India that is embarking on the 'Digital India' journey. Most of them want to rely on the implementation partners to guide their ERP journey. The implementation partners has their own agenda and that may not tie up with the customer's agenda. Tying up with an independent consultant will ensure that the customer's interests are given the due importance during the ERP journey. 

Mr.Kimberling sets out a few questions to determine the quality of an independent consultant. The first is to decide that the consultant is really independent. Many of the 'Independent' consultants are tied up to the ERP ecosystem of product vendors and partners. Customer may not get an independent view from these consultants. Other factors include the hands on experience of the consultant, the time that the consultant can devote to the customer, how many of the customers will provide positive references, what is the consultant turnover of the company etc.  

I think I meet most of the criteria mentioned. I am independent, have significant expertise and have many customers who have given testimonials and references. So call me.   

How to conduct a thorough ERP Audit: By Tom Miller: In my ERP Career spanning about 18 years, I have done many ERP Audits. Most of them were 'Implementation Review' and I have also done 'Post Implementation Review' once. But I never looked at ERP Audits in the structured way in which Tom Miller looks at it in this article. 

He covers a swathe of audits including: 

Compliance Audit - whether the ERP Implementation complies with statutory requirements. Some examples of the regulations are SOX in the US and GDPR in EU. Your ERP application must be formally audited for these regulations.  
Process audit, where you ensure that the ERP complies with Organizational process standards, some of which include PO Approval, Maker Checker audit, Tasks distribution audit etc.  
Risk and control audit covers access controls. 
Security audit covers internal and external espionage and finds if quick response mechanisms are in place to handle security breaches. This is all the more important in the current age of mobility as many devices try to connect to your application.  
System audit covers the entire system including hardware and software including  compliance with internal downtime and uptime standards. 
Waste audit discusses if ERP system helps to reduce / eliminate the seven wastes in an organization. 

I think Mr.Miller has missed two more audits, one is performance audit and the other is license audit. 

This is a comprehensive article.

Getting the most out of your data: Four steps to creating a data strategy: AKA Enterprise Solutions

In my previous job as a CIO in a manufacturing company, there was this one amazing user, who defined his only job after ERP Implementation as analyzing ERP Data and making decisions only after data analysis. It was awesome to the see the kind of results that he managed to get from ERP. The challenge with many companies that implement ERP is that they do not have such ERP Champions in their Organizations. 

To analyze data effectively, the Organization needs an effective data strategy. The strategy should involve the entire data chain from data collection to business intelligence (making effective decisions). This article lays four steps to your data strategy. Step one is to automate data collection. Your data strategy is a non-starter if you start filtering data at the collection stage itself. You must collect as much data as possible. The second step is Data unification. This involves data standardization (file types, standard formats etc) and eliminating data redundancy. The third step is data digestibility. In this step you make the data comparable with other data. An example of data digestibility could be a report that provides you data on the demurrage charges you pay to various logistics vendors. The final step is data usability, where you use the data for process improvements and decision making. In the example of demurrage charges above, you analyze the charges at each step of the logistics chain and redesign the logistics flow to reduce the charges by optimizing the route and bringing in JIT transactions to reduce equipment wait time.

Nice article. Need of the hour I will say.

GDPR - Forcing Organizations to wake up to data protection basics: Chris Middleton in diginomica: 

Sometime ago I had written a blog post on GDPR and its implications for ERP Value Chain. I had mentioned that ERP Implementations should factor in additional time and effort to handle GDPR related compliance requirements.

Here is my article

With this background I was curious to read this article by Chris Middleton. While Data Protection Regulations were always existed, what GDPR has done is to bring the data protections issue into limelight. People have started talking about data protection. The article written with a UK perspective, looks at Data Protection challenges in the wake of Brexit. Many companies that has ERP running both UK and their Europe offices will have to be extra careful and follow the regulatory changes very closely.

So these are my top five articles for this week. See you next week. In the meantime, keep those comments coming.