AJC Bridge to ERP System Selection: Roles & Responsibilities and Timeline

Hi, I'm Andrea Jones and this is the bridge I promised for system selection before implementation. There's a few things I want to talk about and I'm going to cover them in a couple of videos. So today we're going to talk about the system selection, roles, responsibilities for your team, what you can expect and the timeline you can expect for how long it will take to select a system. Also, I'm going to talk about some contract negotiation points that you might want to consider. Probably a separate video because there's a lot. And third, the change management piece of how to bring awareness to the full organization that you're going to be upgrading your ERP or, you know, other system. Okay, so today, again, timeline, roles, responsibilities. So let's start with roles responsibilities. When you're doing any kind of project that is beyond the day to day expectations or job description of any person, including leadership team members, you really need to have someone who is responsible for managing the whole thing, also known as a project manager. So there should be someone managing this, even if it's an internal person, a designated person with I would say 10, 15 hours a week available to do that. Okay. Because remember all the steps we talked about with respect to mapping the processes, gathering requirements, reaching out and researching systems and vendors, getting demos, recording those demos, making sure everybody's asked the same questions, understanding those nuances of partnership as you facilitate down to your top three and kind of driving to the steering committee to make an informed decision. You need somebody to manage that. If it's a distributed thing, it's really unlikely to happen, or at least to happen. Well, in the timeline I'm going to describe to you shortly. So project manager, that's one role. I already alluded to this. But the steering committee, that's another group, typically the CEO, cfo, CEO, all those chief people who are going to make the final decision to. This is the system we're going with and this is the budget we're willing to allocate. Here are the team members we're going to have participate, you know, those decision makers and they should probably reserve some money for project management, whether again it's internal or outsourced. Okay, so steering committee is high level. When you do selection your core team, the people participating with the mapping, identifying the requirements. Right. The subject matter, experts, you need to have one at least person that can represent all the operating functions within the system that you're planning to purchase. So accounting, procurement, customer service, quality, manufacturing, shipping or distribution, warehouse activities, anything that you do that you think will have some role in the system. There should be one person at least who fully understands how you run today and can appreciate what you're going to do in the future. This could change in implementation. You could get lower level people at implementation, but in selection it needs to be somebody who can really push toward that future. Because the last thing you want is someone who does not want to move to a future state selecting your system. I think it's pretty obvious why you don't want that. If not, call me, let's talk. Okay, so that core team is the ones doing those things and it might be the CFO this time around, probably not when you implement, but here it should be. And they ought to have at least about five hours a week to do all these things. The project manager keeps everybody on track, so they need more time, about 15 hours a week. But the subject matter experts, if there's a good project manager, probably can get by in about five. That pushes us into the timeline though, because it is about, you know, we have five high level steps. It's about a month per, and the more high level people who are participating, the harder it is to get their time and of course to focus their time. So I would say give yourselves about a month to do all that requirements stuff to make sure you have a comprehensive list of your critical requirements. Another month to kind of start going to the market and looking at what options are available with systems and vendors. The third month will be focused on demos, really. You have your project manager kind of filtering down some of the systems with that second month. But now you're going to take the time with the core team to watch the demos, to ask the questions, to do the deep dives and in accounting and in customer service modules, warehouse modules or whatever, whatever you need. That's another month of time, right? So remember, you meet with three of these guys. You're going to meet one week for 90 minutes and then the next week for another two hours. I mean, it's just people don't seem to think or recognize that the duration can, can extend. They think it's like, oh, we're just going to do this in two or three weeks. It's just not realistic. Okay, so now we're into the third month and then, you know, we've got to gather up all this information. There will always be some last minute questions. We're kind of going back and forth getting those nuances. That's the fourth month. And then the steering committee is hopefully able to make a decision with the apples to apples in the fifth month. And you move into contract negotiation. So I say five months is a pretty reasonable clip for this level of a team and this very significantly important decision. So again you've got your steering committee of the decision makers, you've got the core team, at least one person per department that's affected. Notice they didn't say sales and marketing often that is not in phase one. Sales and marketing will stay on their own whatever CRM they're using. But sometimes you know you do want them to participate at least in requirements gathering to make sure for future state you can get their information in. So maybe there's someone there too and then the project manager tying it all together about 15 hours a week. I would expect it to take at least five months and depending on the availability of your team how many options you want to look at it could take longer. Hope that is helpful and next time we'll talk about negotiation.