It's also important for senior managers and the other managers and the companies to understand that with the implementation of a large-scale system. It is only natural that productivity of a company would drop upon the go-live date of the system. This is because the staff and the employees are taking time to get used to the new way of doing their work. They have to figure out how to integrate the use of the system in their daily work. So, it is natural that productivity would drop for 18 months or more prior to recovering back to the original level. After recovery productivity level with the correct use of ERP system are likely to go beyond original levels. So, what we know from the past is that it takes up to 18 months for a company to recover back to their original levels of productivity after going live. So it's important to utilize change management techniques. Because change management techniques could help to compress this recovery time from 18 months to six months. So over the years, companies that have implemented ERP systems I have come up with a list of different guidelines that they could use to help businesses in future they're looking at implementing ERP systems, achieved greatest success. So, here are our list of different guidelines that we see are good practices for companies to adopt. So let's take a look at a few of this to see what companies could do to ensure that their success rate of implementing systems are higher. So, right from the top we have the second one is that companies should be utilizing tangible business cases. What business cases actually mean over here is that different business departments could come together and discuss about what are the features that are absolutely necessary? How the implementation of this features or a business module helped them achieve the value in a business process? At the same time it is important for companies to rigorously manage the scope of the ERP project. It is known that during implementations as users walk through the system, they find that they will require further features to help them perform their business tasks. As a result of that they make requests to the implementation team and upon these requests the scope of the entire project grows. As you could imagine the next step of that, is that we have a larger scope the implementation team will not be able to complete the project on time. Another interesting and useful guidelines we have is to expose users to the user interface mock-ups that the system would have in the early stage of the implementation. That way by showing users what this system would look like, they get to have a sense of how friendly the system is, and whether they could utilize a system to fulfill some of the business tasks that they have used to do. It's good to show this early in the implementation process, so that feedback can be taken from end-users to be work back onto finalizing the system itself. This technique goes very well with the age developmental technique. Which simply states that the implementation team should work on each business feature bit by bit. They should first develop a quick version of the business feature, show it to the user, get feedback, make changes, twig it, then allow it to go live. Then, upon the going live of one feature, they could go on to work on another feature. This method of development is much superior compared to the traditional route of using waterfall method of developing. Simply because in a waterfall mode of development, the implementation team only gets to hear, use a feedback at a very late stage on the project. By then it will be very costly to make changes to the system because each of this different features are interlinked, and once you make a change to a single feature, you might be changing other parts of the system. A final thing to have within change management is to allow the change team to perform testing and fine tuning of the systems on a regular basis. So that at the time of going live and even at phases of going live, the system can be ensured to be of a high quality. So if multiple guidelines that is being listed on this slide here are being observed and followed, very likely the company will be having a high chance of succeeding in the ERP implementation. Here are five different ways in which a company could access if your ERP implementation is indeed successful. First of all, they would be considered successful if they are able to finish their implementation within the project time. At the same time, if they could finish the project within the original stated budget. Third, is that they need to finish the project on scope. It is possible for projects in order for them to complete on time and on budget, the implementation team might cutback on certain features. In those cases, then we would say that the project did not finish on scope. Even if a project could finish on time, on budget or on scope, if the final deliver system does not allow the users to carry out the business process correctly or smoothly, there we would say that the quality of the implementation is lack. Finally, in the last step of implementation during the testing phase, the user would have to come in and certified that by stepping through a correct business process using the ERP system. They are able to successfully perform the business task and in more efficient level. If that is achieved, then we are able to say that the implementation would be reaching the benefits that is being envision.
