Skipping business process mapping before an ERP or Enterprise Software project is unnecessarily risky

Further to my post last week 'Why Bother Doing Business Analysis and Process Mapping at the start of an ERP or Enterprise Software project?' this article explains the specific risks you are taking on if you skip this critical phase.

Sure ERP and Enterprise Software come with "Best Practices" baked in...but they are not a silver bullet! In fact, they may not be best practices at all, they are simply the way each particular system works, sometimes efficient and an improvement on how you currently operate but others may be inefficient (e.g. what takes a user raising a Purchase Order 5 key strokes on a single screen currently will need to be done over 3 screens and take twice as long in the new system) and clearly a step backwards.

Despite our best efforts, and the efforts of other consultants, over 60% of organisations in Australia and New Zealand do not have their business processes documented. This statistic could actually be much higher as the survey included many large organisations and in our experience mid size companies almost always do not have their processes documented.

Many leaders and decision makers have fallen for the misguided belief, often espoused by software vendors to help sell their products quickly, that they should just adopt whatever ‘best practice’ processes the new system they are implementing comes with as standard. Whilst this is a good guiding principal, enterprise solutions are flexible and have many different ways they can be set-up, requiring decisions to be made about the optimum way for your business. Obviously it is preferable to have done some thinking on how you'd like to operate in the future and gained consensus from your subject matter experts so you can bring this to the table and discuss with your implementation partner.

The other objective or guiding principal we hear at every client is that they want to 'go vanilla’, which means no customisation at all. According to empirical research done by independent consultants in the US - Panorama Consulting - over 90% of organisations modify their ERP solutions to some degree, despite saying the same thing, when they realise that the processes they are adopting don't match their business needs at the detailed level, especially for the areas of the business that differentiate them to competitors.

The Risks you take when you skip Business Process Mapping when selecting and implementing a new ERP or Enterprise Software solution are as follows:

1. Buying and implementing an ERP or Enterprise Software solution that is not the best-fit for your needs
2. Not addressing all your current pain points and missing opportunities for improvement
3. Implementing unnecessary customisations and apps that add limited value to your organisation
4. Prolonging internal decisions on how things should be done
5. Increasing the scope and cost of the implementation
6. Making change management initiatives more difficult to tailor to individual needs
7. Missing required system integrations
8. Increasing difficulty explaining end-to-end processes for testing and training
9. Not achieving a culture of continuous improvement

If you'd like to know more about each of these risks follow this link to Solution Minds Consulting Research