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ERP
Incremental implementation of
Agile ERP ensures value realisation
By Bill McBeath, ChainLink Research
‘Big bang’ enterprise resource
planning (ERP) implementations
are out. Rapid, incremental ‘little
bang’ implementations are in.
ERP implementers are increasingly
adopting agile software principles
to speed initial deployments and
realise value incrementally.
LEADING EDGE software engineering requires an ERP solution that is architected to
organisations have embraced agile development provide a continuous flow of upgrades and
principles for years, based on rapid, incremental improvements without disrupting the business.
releases. Many feel it’s about time ERP In contrast, for ERP systems designed around
implementers learned and adopted similar big bang implementations, the initial experience
principles, and many leaders have already started and upgrades can be painful and disruptive,
to do this. As the speed of business increases leaving companies lagging further behind their
every year, companies can no longer tolerate long, competition.
expensive, enterprise software implementations.
It seems now is the time for ‘Agile ERP It is critically important for management to
Implementation’. understand the difference between ‘going live’
and ‘realising value’. It’s not enough to turn on the
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a ERP switch and declare victory. The critical goal
category of business-management software is having a system that is useable, the business’s
– typically a suite of integrated applications – processes and people executing as they should,
that an organisation can use to collect, store, and the solution is creating value for the firm.
manage and interpret data from many business
activities, including: product planning, purchase, One way to solve the ‘last mile’ problem and
manufacturing or service delivery. get up and running more quickly is by using
industry-specific successful practice blueprints.
With such broad implications, it’s all the more These blueprints are comprised of industry-
reason to ensure implementation is as effective as specific configurations, based on past successful
possible, not necessarily as fast as possible. implementations, including things like system-to-
system data mappings, user roles, and role-specific
Technology is often best absorbed in bite-sized workflows, business rules, dashboards, reports, and
chunks. In the same way that agile startups seek analytics.
to distribute the ‘minimum viable product’ as soon
as possible, agile business seeks to implement the Usually, existing data is incomplete and contains
‘minimum viable implementation’, to speed up many duplicates and incorrect data, especially for
time-to-value, by making adjustments and adding companies coming off manual systems. Cleanup
capabilities in ongoing, rapid, incremental steps. and enrichment/completion of the data is a critical
part of implementation. The amount of time it
With Agile ERP, a business continuously takes to clean up the data and the effectiveness of
improves. It implements small but meaningful the process are an important factor in the time-to-
improvements at a frequent cadence. These value equation.
include continually improving and refining
processes and keeping up with the latest This is where leveraging the solution provider’s
functional and technology improvements (big experience can be valuable, especially for those
data, mobile, analytics, and so forth). This initial decisions. •
4 August 2016 | Logistics News
