ACC IMPLEMENTATION: BUSINESS READINESS

Step 5 of the ACC Software Solutions ERP Implementation Process: ERP Business Readiness

After several months of thorough planning, building, and testing you may come to a point where you think to yourself, “We’re ready for ERP go-live!”

While it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of completing major milestones, it’s important to be completely prepared before flipping the switch.

During the fifth step of your ERP implementation with ACC Software Solutions, you’ll have a business readiness meeting to determine if you’re actually ready for go-live.

What is ERP readiness? In short, an ERP readiness assessment is the process of analyzing whether your company has the structure, resources, and personnel in place to successfully support an ERP software implementation.

Here are some of the things you will need to have completed:

Testing Phase

ERP testing is a quality assurance (QA) processes that verifies the functionality and configuration of an ERP software throughout the implementation process to ensure project success. Functional testing, integration testing, performance testing, security testing, regression testing, and user acceptance testing are just some of the tests you will undergo to ensure your customizations, configurations, and integrations are ready. Achieving a high pass rate on these tests is a good indicator that you’re ready for go-live.

To read more about the types of tests you should complete during the testing phase of your ERP implementation, click here.

Data Migration

The data migration process is critical to ensuring the data in your new ERP system is accurate and complete.

Practicing your data migration into your new ERP system is just like a group of entertainers preparing for a big performance. The entertainers are your project team, the lines they are rehearsing are your business processes, and their costumes/lighting are the production data and environment. While preparing for your data migration, you may find data discrepancies, redundancies, and regulatory issues.

Data doesn’t always play nice. Even if you’ve practiced the migration from your legacy software to the new ERP several times, it’s best not to wait until the night before go-live to perform the actual migration.

You should determine a closing date when legacy transactions will no longer be considered for migration. Any new transactions past the closing date can be migrated over in a separate wave.

Environment Readiness

Now this sounds like a walk in the park, but you’d be surprised by the different definitions of “ready” you’ll find amongst your project team.

The best definition of “ready” is: the foundation for the production environment is in place and tuned to maximum performance. This means configurations are enabled, users are loaded, and security roles are turned on. It also includes the purchase and configuration of any required hardware, like printers, scanners, scales, registers, or payment readers.

Project Timeline Communication

Your project schedule, timeline, and milestones need to be shared and updated with your project team on a regular basis. COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE.

It should never come as a surprise to end-users when they can no longer access their legacy tools, or if the project gets pushed back. The key to a successful implementation is communication between your team, end-users, and your partner.

Support Team Preparation

When incidents come up (and they will), you’ll need a support team equipped with all the necessary resources. This team should have access to ERP experts, business analysts, process specialists and change management champions. This ensures that whatever ticket comes through the help desk can be addressed without scrambling to find the right resource.

The process for creating and managing incoming tickets is also important to define before go-live. You don’t want added stress during post go-live because this is already a busy time.