Guide
Every vendor has an ERP implementation methodology with a clever name. The plan that actually protects you is simpler and belongs to you, not them. Here are the phases, what each one has to produce before the next starts, and the checklist we use on client side programmes.
By Christopher Fagan, Managing Partner, PEF Consulting Partners
The implementation partner will arrive with a plan. It will be organised around their deliverables and their invoicing milestones, which is reasonable from their side and insufficient from yours. The client side ERP implementation plan sits above it and covers the things the vendor plan does not: your data, your process decisions, your people, your testing of your business, your cutover and your benefits. The single most reliable predictor of a good go live is whether the client owns a plan of its own or simply tracks the vendor’s.
Mobilise: the business case, the governance, the team, the partner contract and the scope baseline, with the hard decisions about what will not change documented before design starts. Design: the future processes, the configuration decisions, the data model and the integration list, signed off by the people who will run them. Build and configure: the system is set up, the integrations written, the data migration developed and rehearsed for the first time. Test: unit testing by the partner, then system integration testing, then user acceptance testing on migrated data by your own people, with defects triaged by business impact. Cutover: the final migration rehearsal, the go or no go criteria, the freeze, the cutover weekend and the hypercare plan. Realise: the weeks and months after go live when adoption is measured, the backlog worked and the benefits tracked against the business case.
For a mid sized organisation on a mainstream platform, mobilisation takes four to eight weeks, design eight to twelve, build three to five months, testing two to three months and cutover a month including hypercare, which gives the nine to fifteen month range most honest timelines land in. Larger or multi entity programmes run eighteen months to three years and are better phased by entity or by process than attempted at once. The phases that get squeezed when a date slips are always testing and cutover rehearsal, which is precisely why so many go lives are followed by months of billing and reporting problems.
Before design: business case approved with owners for each benefit; executive sponsor named and available; scope and the list of processes that will not change signed off; implementation partner contract with acceptance criteria, change control and remedies; data owners named for every master data object. Before build: future processes signed off by the people who run them; configuration decisions logged with the reason; integration list agreed with the owners of the other systems; data migration strategy including cleansing rules and reconciliation; test strategy with entry and exit criteria. Before testing: at least one full migration rehearsal reconciled to the penny; test scripts written from business scenarios, not from the configuration; defect severity definitions agreed. Before go live: go or no go criteria written down in advance; cutover plan rehearsed end to end with timings; hypercare team, rota and escalation; training complete for every role; rollback decision point agreed. After go live: first month end close plan; benefits tracker live; adoption measured by role; lessons learned run while people still remember.
Letting the partner own the test strategy, so the system is tested against its configuration rather than your business. Treating data migration as a technical task that starts in build, when the cleansing should start in mobilisation. And setting the go live date before design, then protecting the date by cutting the phases that protect the business. If you want a quick view of whether your organisation is ready to start, our free ERP readiness check takes twelve questions.
Related reading: ERP implementation partner UK, how long does an ERP implementation take, ERP implementation cost UK, ERP data migration: what goes wrong, the free ERP readiness check, the ERP business case guide.
Mobilise, design, build and configure, test, cutover and realise. Vendors use different names and sometimes split or merge them, but every sound plan contains those six, each with an exit gate that has to be met before the next phase starts.
Scope and the processes that will not change, governance and decision rights, the partner contract milestones, the data migration and cleansing plan, the test strategy with entry and exit criteria, the cutover and hypercare plan, training by role and the benefits tracker. It should be owned by the client, not the vendor.
An executive sponsor, a client side programme manager, process owners from finance, operations and sales who can make decisions, a data lead, a test lead, a change lead and the IT owners of the systems being integrated. The partner supplies the configurers and developers; the decisions stay with you.
No. Methodologies such as SAP Activate, Oracle Unified Method or Microsoft Success by Design are good descriptions of the vendor’s work. They say little about your data, your process decisions, your acceptance of the system or your benefits, which is where implementations fail.
If you are building an ERP implementation plan and want someone client side who has run them on every major platform, a short confidential conversation is a good first step.