Software is Great - Implementation still not there

ERP is predicted to hit the 50 billion in sales by 2020 while more and more products are hitting the market. Now products are for specific niches, and a vast majority of SMBs and SMEs are adopting the ERP trend. Of course, the cloud has quite a bit to do with this trend as the products are now easier deploy. With all this new technology and innovated products how is it that implementations are still slacking and ERP failures are actually higher than the year before? 

I do realize that this is not a new topic and has been, well the bane of the ERP world since the beginning but you would think that as the applications become “easier” to deploy the success rates would certainly rise would they not? At the end of the day, it is about people and whom those people in the business decided to include.

I have noticed the massive influx of ERP consultants running around selling licenses and grabbing any or whomever they can get to do the implementation as it seems there are not enough experienced people. The sales are pushing how easy and simple the process is while never conducting one and not setting expectations. Also, there are the businesses implementing for the first time and while defining their processes add to the white board all “nice to haves” features and the inexperience implementation team does not know how to again set expectations and get the project back on track.

Now that we have sales setting the wrong expectation, an inexperienced implementation team on both sides of the house, you now have an array of additional 3rd party products or development teams wanting a piece of the pie. Once you begin the “nice to have” path and not focusing on your core processes the trouble will only compound. Granted, that might be some of your core or must have included these but does it really? That, I believe is the fundamental flaw with implementations today. Everyone wants it now with the bells and whistles, while everyone wants a piece of the pie without even how what type of pie is it.

This phrase has been around a very long time and still hold true today “Keep it simple stupid.” If you as an organization do not know what success should look like before going in, you need to go back to the drawing table and get that taken care of. The problem of this just doesn’t end with implementation; it continues well into the post. Organizations that have already implemented are looking to obtain customization's, add-ons, integrations, or having certain issues with their application they are turning to businesses that say they can do the job. Unfortunately, what is happening more and more is that even though they say they can “fix” the problem what is really happening is the professional services company will conduct one or two “discovery” calls to get an overall idea of what the problem is. Then the services company will come back with an agreement stating that they will allocate 10 hours for x amount of money to “further” understand what is really going on. Once that is completed, the services company generally comes back with a new proposal on how much it is going to cost to fix the problem. 

How is this right? If I am a customer this is what I want; I want to say that this is my issue and what is it going to take to fix. I want my services company to say absolutely, let’s jump in figure out what the root cause is and then we will provide a proposal on how much it is going to cost to fix. I am certain that majority of issue(s) can and should be done this way.