STORIES & SOLUTIONS FOR THE MODERN BUSINESS USER

It’s not every day an organization goes through a system selection process for a new ERP. The process for making a change to one of the most mission-critical technology investments can be long and complex, and it’s often the responsibility of the CIO to get it right. Selecting the right system isn’t where the work ends; moving employees through change and helping them adapt to the new way of working is a key to success that leaders often neglect. Here are five system selection success factors every CIO should consider.

Start with the end in mind: Optimize your future state by leveraging the current state

When beginning a digital transformation project, most organizations are focused on their future vision. While knowing your goal state for business processes and systems is important for a successful transformation, it is also important to leverage your current state. The Tambellini group explains that doing so can be energizing for teams by bringing together problem silvers and removing day-to-day issues that may arise. Here is how leveraging your current state will optimize your end goal and help you get there.

Angelo Mazzocco recently joined the Avaap Advisory Services team, bringing years of CIO experience as well as a view from the enterprise technology buyer perspective. We asked him to share insight to guide the decision process when buying ERP or other enterprise software.

Holley Schramski, the former associate vice president of finance at the University of Georgia, recognized that her team was performing a lot of manual labor for their data processes. She recalls her associate controller being frustrated as Excel kept crashing while she tried to wrap up financial statements. Schramski said that UGA was “never going to evolve from a transactional operation to becoming more analytical unless we stopped all of our manual processes and started automating processes for our team.”

When the pandemic forced the country to stay home, government stakeholders immediately realized that their legacy systems had left them ill-equipped to keep up with the demand for constituent services and implement protocols to reduce risks to public health and safety.

For healthcare organizations that are seeking to improve productivity, increase efficiency, and reduce costs while improving care quality, a cloud-based ERP system is the perfect move to kick off your digital transformation strategy. Organizations that haven’t made the move to cloud yet are likely to be running a newly implemented EHR that is only partially, if at all, connected with your legacy ERP.

According to the most recent McKinsey Global Survey on digital transformations, more than eight in ten respondents say their organisations have undertaken such efforts in the past five years. Digital transformation provides a valuable opportunity to move away from manual processes, increase productivity and efficiency, and allow leaders to focus on more strategic initiatives.

While the threat of ERP implementation failure sounds scary (and practically expected), a recent Mint Jutras study found that 67 percent of manufacturers and distributors rated their implementations as successful or very successful. With proper planning and buy-in, a successful ERP implementation can save your organization money and improve back-end processes. Here are the morbid missteps to avoid and keep your ERP project out of the implementation graveyard.

A lot of ERP implementation projects fail. And a failure to get ERP employee buy-in is one of the primary reasons. On average, 37% of employees use a company’s ERP system according to a Software Path report; that’s a big percentage of your workforce that needs to be invested in using the system to its full capability. Let’s look at a few ways to improve the odds that employees will buy-in or even push to get that new ERP.

Historically, community, critical access, and rural hospitals didn’t have many options when it came to their enterprise systems. Tight margins and limited technical support have held smaller hospitals back from being able to invest in enterprise-scale ERP systems. Often, disconnected systems and paper-based processes were often put in place for materials management, financials, human resources, etc.