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ERP at the Speed of Light
Making Rapid Implementation Work for You
Clients who are implementing Enterprise Resource Planning software for the first time tend to be
initially intimidated by the time and cost of an implementation and seek to accelerate the go-live
date. Such acceleration, when accomplished with the right strategy and tools, can be of tremendous
benefit, including a reduction of costs and reduced time-to-benefit (TTB). However, without the right
strategy and tools, implementation acceleration carries the risk of abbreviated end user training and
change management, a lack of post implementation planning, over-engineering of business
processes, and other problems that in fact lead to higher over-all cost of ownership and the erosion
of business benefit.
For some, the question is: to accelerate or not to accelerate? Without acceleration, the
implementation will be more costly but other risks will be mitigated. Cost versus risk appears to be
the choice.
In point of fact, as we will illuminate herein, clients can have it both ways.
A Brief History of ERP Implementation Methods
Prior to 1997, methodologies deployed by the various systems integrators were not adequately
tailored to the unique requirements of ERP. Most relied heavily on the As-Is and To-Be phases as
per pre-ERP enterprise applications projects. In the As-Is phase, a firm’s current business processes
were inventoried, charted, and scripted. In the To-Be phase, a firm’s future business processes were
designed, charted, and scripted. Ideally, these steps went as follows:
As-Is described the status quo of business processes
To-Be described the direct transfer of the as-is process into a to-be process that eliminates the
weak points and achieves the intended benefit.
The key weakness of these methodologies lay in the slavish attention to the As-Is phase in which
lower-level business processes were pointlessly charted and scripted at an exorbitant cost to clients
and with