November 201819 Any ERP deployment is a significant step for any company. The expectation is that the new ERP system will provide a more modern business solution, using latest technologies that will help users, and ultimately support in driving the business forward. To achieve this goal, a carefully planned process is taken to deploy an ERP system. Almost everyone in the ERP community is more than familiar with the typical deployment lifecycle of COMMONLY UNDERESTIMATED AREAS IN AN ERP IMPLEMENTATIONCXO NSIGHTSBY KARTHIK GOPALAKRISHNAN, GLOBAL ERP MANAGER, ASCOM AND MARK LAING, VP OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, ASCOMan ERP system - requirements gathering, design, develop, test, deploy. If we search the internet for "ERP deployment" there is a ton of information available on how to deploy an ERP system. But still, in spite of this wealth of information, experience and skills in this area, not all deployments happen within the constraints of the project. Many projects are ridden with time slippage, over-budgets, poor quality, and frustrated users.Time, cost, quality and adoption are the 4 pillars on which any ERP deployment stands. While time and cost are high-visibility aspects in an ERP deployment, quality and user adoption determine the success or failure of the deployment to a large extent. This article lists these frequently underestimated areas of an ERP deployment that often proves costly.\Data loadsAny ERP implementation requires initial data loads to take place. At the outset, initial data loads sound like a simple purely IT task. After all, it is just a matter of export legacy data-map fields to new ERP system-import data, right? Wrong. In reality, data loads are in reality a functional fit-gap analysis process - viewed from a data standpoint. A data load process requires an understanding of how the fields from the legacy system, maps to the new ERP system. If we blindly map all legacy fields, we would create a whole lot of new fields, and not leverage the features of the new ERP system.So, data load really comes down to deciding between leveraging existing fields VS creating new fields, which translates to balancing between retaining legacy processes versus adopting the more efficient processes of the ERP system. And such a
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