Digital transformation offers substantial benefits, but also involves high risk. Few projects have the potential to change your business as much as a Cloud ERP implementation.
Equally, few projects have the same potential to go wrong. In their emerging tech roadmap Gartner rates cloud ERP as both highest risk and highest value.
Cloud ERP implementations have a high risk, and they can quickly spiral out of control. By using Qualibrate, you can de-risk your project.
Cloud ERP Can Transform Your Business
Few things can benefit your business as much as a transition to Cloud ERP. Switching from an on-premises solution gives many benefits. These include, but aren't limited to, the following:
- Reduced maintenance effort
- Reduced infrastructure costs
- Infrastructure as Code
- Always up-to-date
- Easy access
- Dynamic licensing
Moving to SaaS Will Require Lots of Change
To realise these benefits you need to undergo a substantial ERP transition project. There is no getting away from it, and cloud ERP projects are complex.
Whether you're going full cloud or hybrid ERP, moving your core business system to SaaS involves many changes.
1. Changes to Business Processes: To start with, you are changing your business processes. That is, you are changing the way your business works.
2. Changes to Your Software Landscape: You're not just changing your ERP system; you’re also changing legacy interfaces and interconnected systems.
3. Changes to Your End-User Activity: On top of that, you're changing your end-user experience. You'll be impacting your employees’ day-to-day jobs.
This Change Brings a High Level of Risk
Any significant change brings risk. Cloud ERP brings more risk than most. There are few projects that will impact so many areas of your business.
Because so many people are impacted by this change, there are so many opportunities to go wrong.
Business Process Risks
At a very basic level, your new business processes should be designed to allow your business to thrive. Of course, we all start projects with the best intentions. But sometimes, in the planning stages, incorrect assumptions are made.
Business processes need to be planned out before they’re implemented. They need to be clear and easy to understand. If they don’t accurately represent your business needs, they’ll do more harm than good.
Software Landscape Risks
It’s all too common for software development to makes things more complex than necessary. I’m sure you’ve experienced it yourself; the customer asks for a bridge, but delivery build them a tunnel. Cloud ERP implementations need to be built around simplicity.
At a basic level, the ERP configuration needs to match the business processes agreed upon at the start of the project. Also, your legacy interfaces need to be as streamlined as possible.
With Cloud ERP, you don’t control updates. ERP vendors will push changes directly to you - your interfaces may well need to change in the future.
End-User Activity Risks
Let’s say you’ve built the perfect solution, which accurately matches all of your business requirements. You still need to enable your team.
Far too often, end-user training is the poor-man of software development. Training is kept out of the loop until it’s too late. Given barely enough time to acquaint the training team with the tool, let alone develop collateral.
Training is left with no time to actually deliver training. If your users don’t know how to perform your business process, your business will grind to a halt.
With SaaS Solutions, You Have Limited Ability to Make Quick Workarounds
All of these risks are compounded by Cloud ERP. They require you to give up a lot of control. With traditional software, you’d have the flexibility to make quick fixes and workarounds. You don’t have that luxury with SaaS solutions.
You need to get all these changes right the first time. If not, your system will be tarnished forever.
How to De-Risk Your Cloud ERP Transition
There's a lot to factor into your Cloud ERP implementation. There’s too much to cover in a book, let alone a single blog. That being said, a successful transformation can be broken into 3 high-level steps:
- Ensure your to-be business processes are understood and documented
- Ensure your end-to-end functionality works as per your documented business processes - Core ERP and all interfaced/legacy systems
- Ensure your end-users know what's coming with their new processes
These steps are relatively straightforward on their own. The risk comes when these steps are not performed in concert.
You Need a Consistent Truth Throughout Your ERP Deployment
Each of the three steps above follow on from the next. Your business processes become your tests, which become your end-user training documents.
To de-risk your cloud-based ERP, you need a single source of truth running through your project. Maintaining multiple sources of information will add even more complexity to your project.
Your Business Processes, Test Cases, and User Training Documentation must match up perfectly.
Accelerate Your Cloud ERP Journey: Arrive Safely with Qualibrate
As highlighted by Gartner, Cloud ERP transitions can make a huge difference to your organisation, but they carry significant risk. Maintaining accurate and up-to-date project documentation can present a challenge.
Separate versions of the truth will lead to defective functionality and a terrible user experience.
Qualibrate solves this problem by giving you a single source of truth.
With Qualibrate, your business process information is created in a single location. You can then instantly generate your test cases and end-user manuals from this single source of truth without any additional effort.
Qualibrate automatically generates
- Business Process Documentation
- Automated End-to-End Test Cases
- End-User Training Documentation
When you use Qualibrate, everyone has up-to-date information
Not only that, but Qualibrate also removes your documentation creation effort. You only need to enter your processes in a single location, but you’ll be able to generate three different documents. All available at the click of a button.
You can create your business process documentation, tests, and training documentation in one fell swoop.
Watch a demo of Qualibrate today - De-risk your cloud ERP project
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
