Successful Projects

Successful Projects – The factors for success are many. For a SME company with 10 to 100 employees, we believe that two are more important than all others.

• Top management support
• Project champion

Top management support is typically the owner/CEO.

The project champion should be someone who has the time and knowledge to work on the details of the project. This person should be clearly given the authority and responsibility for implementing the new system. They will need to be involved in many parts of the organisation and will encounter organisational change resistance.

Only for very small companies is it realistic that the owner/manager can implement a new system themselves.

The role of the top manager is to determine the vision of what the company will be like after the system is implemented (the Why), set the overall process and timetable (the How) and communicate these to all parts of the organisation.

The role of the project champion (aka the key user) is to deal with the details of the implementation as described in this manual.

It goes without saying that the project champion needs available time for the project.

If the project champion has experience of one of the large ERP systems such as SAP, Dynamics, Netsuite etc. then they will find the implemenation of Manu Online rather easy.

In larger projects, it may be wise to appoint a “steering group” to support top management, and a “project group” to support the project champion.

Other issues relating to success

Once a competent organisation is established there will be many factors that affect the work involved. Projects can be simple or complex, short or long.

Factors to consider in the project are:

• Is a steering committee needed or not
• What is the knowledge and experience of key personnel and do they need training and education
• Does everyone have the needed time available to work on the project
• How to manage expectations and change resistance
• What kind of services are needed from the vendor
• Will 3^rd party consultants be used
• Avoiding or using customization
• Data quality, cleansing and conversion
• Changes to business processes as part of the implementation
• Possible new hardware requirements, maybe even new cable routing to production areas

Short form v. long form projects

There is no question that there are simple and more complex projects.

Despite that we want all projects to be simple, we have to face reality that businesses are complex and as an organisation, its process and transaction rates grow, then complexity grows exponentially. Handling this complexity is of course the reason for an ERP system. However the implementation effort needs to be sized to the complexity of the work to be done.

This also depends on the company size. A company with 5 employees may easily implement a project without formal processes, but a 100 employee company will certainly need a long form project.

Get in touch today about your manufacturing challenges. Let our experience consultants help your company as they did with many other successful projects!

We work with Xero.