STORIES & SOLUTIONS FOR THE MODERN BUSINESS USER

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.

Anyone who has been part of an ERP implementation knows the importance of having the right people on the project team. While emphasis is typically put on the technology itself, in the end, it is the people of the organization who are using the system. They are the ones who need to know the ins and outs of the software. Dedicating the right resources who know the business, the vision for the future and how the system will be used can drive a more seamless implementation.

The distribution industry is in transition. Companies working on older technologies are realizing limitations with their current systems while other organizations have already begun their digital transformation journey. One of the biggest roadblocks for organizations to becoming digital pioneers is not having a clear overall digital roadmap.

“Double, double toil and trouble;