Construction ERP Replacement: Open Heart Surgery or a Minimally Invasive Procedure?
The construction industry is plagued by a widespread technological ailment: painful Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. These systems are the heart and vascular system of any financial enterprise – from managing payroll, revenues, costs to ensuring the business is compliant. Yet the industry struggles with ERPs in terms of clunky data flow, process management and integration with other systems. ERP implementations are often poorly executed in terms of change management, process governance, vendor support and user adoption. According to Gartner, up to 70% of ERP projects fail to meet expectations, leading to wasted resources and organizational frustration.
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A Look Inside
Step 1: Get Your Data Right, Early and Often
A critical first step is to establish data governance well in advance of an ERP implementation. Start with an inventory of your data stores. You likely have silos of data belonging to different teams and business units – not to mention living in different systems. Take stock of the data you’re capturing, and which data elements are commonly used across data storage.
Step 2: Unify Your Data and Systems with a Framework Based on a Universal Platform
Historically the construction industry has been challenged with disparate, disconnected applications that hinder effective data management. Fortunately, technology has become available to solve these challenges using universal platforms. Using open-architecture tools from Microsoft, this approach unifies disparate processes and application silos into a cohesive data framework. Such a toolset will greatly facilitate step one above.
Step 3: Build Process Muscles with Automated Workflows
The goal is to get your process optimized and automated as much as possible. Define your business process flow from end to end. Once this is established, enable as many process automations as possible to narrow the complexity of the ERP once it comes time for execution. A more manageable ERP implementation necessitates reducing its scope to basic financial general ledger functions. Workflows that had traditionally resided in the traditional ERP realm can be automated and managed outside the ERP via the universal platform that is seamlessly integrated with core business applications.
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