SAP Signavio's Chet Harter recently spoke to us about ERP transformation. Watch Chet explain his top tips for success.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms like SAP touch every part of your business from logistics to operations. Changing to a new ERP system is akin to replacing a car's engine while it's still driving along a highway at 70 miles per hour.
Yet, if you don't put a new engine in your car somehow, you'll eventually break down and roll to a stop. Just as, without a cutting edge ERP system, you'll end up at a competitive disadvantage.
SAP Signavio is a vital tool for business transformations like ERP upgrades, mapping your business processes so you have the intelligence you need for a smooth transformation. Partnered with the ability of the LeanIX platform to map your IT landscape, the two platforms empower your transformation.
Chet Harter, VP of Market Impact at Signavio, recently spoke to us about how he's seeing his customers succeed in their ERP transformations by leveraging both our platforms. He offered his four tips for ERP transformation success.
You can watch the full video of our conversation above, and deep dive into each of the tips below.
Tip 1: Get Dedicated Change Management People
To skip to the end, the key success factor in enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation is change management. ERP transformation involves significant work across every area of your business, so ensuring everyone sees the value of that work and co-ordinating their efforts is key.
Every part of your organization will understand how your ERP tool connects to their own work, meaning each person will have intelligence you need to complete your transformation. Gathering all that data together is quite a task.
It's often tempting to see that task as a temporary project and simply make it an additional to-do on someone's, already busy, schedule. Chet tells us that this is a major mistake.
"I need to have people who are focused, educated, trained, experienced in change management and those people need to have the tools that they need to do the work... as well as high quality data that they can make decisions from."
Chet Harter, VP Market Impact, SAP Signavio
Change management is a full-time job, and you need a dedicated team doing it, armed with the skills, tools, and data to get things done. It can't just be an afterthought.
With a properly empowered change management function, your transformation initiative is far more likely to succeed, and offer you a return on your investment. This is the difference between success and failure.
Tip 2: Get People Involved Early
As Chet told us, enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation requires the support of your entire organization working together. The more people involved in your transformation, the less resistance there will be to the change.
Yet, depending on the size of your organization, this could mean engaging thousands of people in multiple countries. This isn't something that can be done overnight.
It will take time to engage all of those people, and their help will be needed at every stage of your transformation journey. This is why it's vitally important to engage everyone in your organization in your ERP transformation at the very start of the process.
Chet Harter, VP Market Impact, SAP Signavio
Tip 3: Pick The Right Tool
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation, like anything else, requires the right toolset for the right job. This is even more important when you're involving a diverse group of stakeholders from across your organization.
Your toolset can't just be a private information repository for your change management team or it won't achieve the value that you need. Creating a single source of truth on ERP transformation for your entire organization will get everyone on the same page and working to the same goals.
That's why SAP Signavio and LeanIX are the perfect tools for showcasing your application and IT component portfolio, and your business processes, to everyone. To do that, your toolsets need to be viewable to everyone in your organization and simple enough for all of them to be able to use.
Chet Harter, VP Market Impact, SAP Signavio
Tip 4: Plan, Plan, Plan
So, you have a dedicated change management team in place for your enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation, and your whole organization is engaged in the process, what next? Now, you need a plan.
Change cannot happen all in one go. You need to follow a process through a series of stages to allow change to progress naturally and slowly.
This means dealing with your project one change at a time, in sequence. Road mapping what you're going to change at what time will keep you on the path to ERP transformation.
That's why you need LeanIX and Signavio to map and co-ordinate your transformation plan. Working together, the platforms can offer a single source of truth to focus your organization on ERP transformation success.
LeanIX And SAP Signavio: Empowering Business Transformation
The combination of LeanIX and SAP Signavio facilitates effective collaboration between business process management and enterprise architecture. This enables faster, smarter decisions at every stage of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation.
Offer your stakeholders easy access to process maps, diagrams, and an architecture repository, all in one place. This means you can answer key stakeholder questions instantly and back your answers up with visual evidence.
All of this can be automated with the out-of-the-box Signavio integration within the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture platform. To find out more, download our free whitepaper:
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