Time to Replace Your ERP System – Make Sure What You Want is What You Get
Part II – Make Sure What You Want is What You Get
Somewhere between what you want and what you get, many good manufacturing ERP projects lose focus on the sole reason why there is a replacement initiative in place. Now that you’ve looked into the future on what your needs may be it’s time to look at what you exactly you need to accomplish both from a big picture and operation perspective.
In the big picture you’ll want to look at things like:
- Reducing your lead-times and cycle-times
- Increasing the accuracy of your costing
- Protecting your profit margin.
- Boosting your market share
- Lowering your inventories
- Shortening your product life cycles
- Enhancing loyalty of your customers by responding faster and more effective
- Streamlining communications
All of the vendors you’ll end up talking to will absolutely tell you they can deliver on these, and they probably can. But can they deliver for you, specifically. The better you flesh out these points specific to your business the better you’ll be able to evaluate when you get into the feature function part of your evaluation.
Operationally a list to consider:
- Usability and user interface
- Stability
- Type of IT setup can you can support
- Should you look for a cloud solution
- Ease of administration
- Language Support
- Flexibility to change as your business changes
- Expansion capabilities as your business grows
- Support Solutions and options
Basically, whats important to you day to day. You may take 10 weeks to make a decision but you’ll live with that decision for the next 10 years. If the operation of a new manufacturing ERP system doesn’t fit your operation you’ll never be able to hit your big picture objectives.
The better you plan overall and lay out your goals now the more likely you will be able to archive them once you implement your new ERP system.