ERP Achievement: The Elevator Pitch

Continued Organizational Success Often Implies Change

Demands for business success are significant. Tough conversations occur in boardrooms all across the country. Practitioners, business owners, executives, stakeholders, and employees often experience significant organizational challenges. Organizations can experience great strain and challenges induced by business growth, needed business correction, or challenging and changing business environments. Companies are constantly under great demands to be competitive, innovative, and creative (yet with diminishing resources) in an effort to stay relevant and competitive and to maintain a healthy organization. Business intelligence allows you to understand your business environment and position so your company can stay healthy.

Business Intelligence Often Comes in the Form of ERP

Accurate and timely information is one of the most important assets for any organization to allow them to rapidly respond to changing business conditions. Sometimes remaining competitive and healthy requires significant organizational change. And one of those change agents is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that act as a tool to drive improvements and to create or maintain competitive advantage. But, ERP organizational change, although often a necessity, is in and of itself a tremendous organizational change effort. ERP organizational change is a time of high stress, significant stakeholder frustrations, business interruptions, and even failure. But, why is this the case? Does it have to be this way? How can we, as practitioners, positively impact and improve ERP organizational change?

Nestell & Associates wants to help answer those questions and to bring the greatest value to organizations.

What is ERP? What Value does ERP have to Organizations?

An organization’s ERP data is stored in one system and can be accessed at anytime from anywhere. There’s no need for separate systems to cover your data needs. This unified system improves the availability of common operational information and practices throughout the organization. ERP allows the sharing and dissemination of information in an efficient way within the organization. One of the major benefits and ROI of ERP is that it streamlines your processes, improving your efficiency. Effective use of ERP systems is a key competitive advantage for organizations.

Organizations implement ERP solutions in an effort to improve business process performance, enforce compliance, improve employee tasks, and improve integration across company locations. These benefits are realized because, by general definition, ERP is designed for managing enterprise resources via integrated corporate functions in one common system. Seamless integration of business processes improves workflow and accomplishes real-time and accurate information availability. ERP software has strong potential benefits and value. But ERP achievement, and effectively and efficiently realizing these benefits, is often no easy feat.

The Organizational Challenge

While the benefits and potential competitive advantage are well understood, ERP organizational change has inherent and potentially significant business risks. A great deal of research demonstrates a high failure rate and/or significant challenges with ERP organizational change efforts. Anecdotal evidence and research demonstrate that in general, the realization of ERP’s potential benefits can be challenging to fully realize. Significant challenges as well as a high failure rate can cause business interruptions causing organizations to fail in their ERP implementations. Even though many of the challenges are known, their failure rates don’t seem to be improving. Significant ERP implementation challenges remain problematic.

Importance of Addressing ERP Organizational Change Challenges

Successful ERP organizational change matters because the evidence and objective research demonstrate that failure, as well as ineffective and inefficient deployment, is extremely costly to organizations. Failure to effectively implement ERP software could lead to a loss of production, a decrease in product quality, loss of customers, or loss of sales. This would cause a major setback for the organization and could result in further losses of time, money and resources. Or, worst yet, plant closure or business bankruptcy. It is not only the costs of an ERP failure, it’s the loss of the return on investment (ROI) and benefits that a successful ERP can bring to an organization.

The goal of Nestell & Associates is to provide additional objective data and insight that may be helpful to organizations toward meeting the goal of successful ERP assimilation via improved ERP organizational change performance.

ERP Critical Success Factors

ERP organizational change risk, failures, and challenges over the last three decades have driven the demand for research and investigation. Research among practitioners and academia has provided insight into ERP “success models” and “critical success factors (CSF)”. Scholars and practitioners continue the search to find common denominators in considering all possible influences upon ERP organizational change success. ERP organizational change can be a significant challenge directly related to many complex and dynamic critical success factors.

As practitioners and researchers, Nestell & Associates hopes to continue to add to this body of work.

What Does Objective Research Say about ERP Implementation Success?

Literature review identifies many potential root causes of gaps in the implementation of ERP systems. General research regarding success models and critical success factors demonstrates a vast array of people, processes, and technological factors. Understanding, awareness of, and properly prioritizing these factors at the onset of a project plays a crucial role in success. Additionally, research notes that there is a lack of routine and quality reflection in practice. Organizations that take action based on critical success factor knowledge will be better prepared with the organizational skills needed to increase the likelihood of ERP assimilation and meeting organizational goals.

ERP research continues today because ERP failure, and challenges, still exist and haven’t improved greatly since the 1990s. The evolution of ERP research continues to look at the problem from different fields of study, models, and perspectives. The collective benefits, knowledge, and awareness of this work could lead to improved organizational ERP performance and success.

At Nestell & Associates, we trust in proven theories and principles and solid objective research founded in scientific rigor.

The Nestell & Associates Approach to ERP Success

ERP achievement and success are all about effective and efficient practice and approach throughout the entire ERP organizational change cycle. At Nestell & Associates, we:

• Utilize and apply sound performance research.
• Provide a methodical approach to appraising stakeholder performance goals and identifying gaps and then allows the examination of each of the assumed stakeholder knowledge, motivation, and organizational influences and their impact on organizational and individual performance.
• Focus on the organizational culture and the people.
• Focus on understanding an organization’s business model.
• Ensure that the software is the perfect fit with appropriate features & functions for the organization context.
• Ensure to have disciplined project management.

Additionally, Netsell & Associates are pioneers in:

• Ensuring that ERP organizational change incorporates tactical action for effective and efficient Learning and Development (L&D)
• Managing and measuring organizational culture
• Incorporating leadership reviews and their impact on successful ERP organizational change.

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