As a small or mid-sized manufacturing company begins to grow there will be an inevitable need to make adjustments to day to day operations in order to accommodate increased demands. Scaling up operations doesn’t just mean setting yourself up for success today, it also means setting yourself up for tomorrow. In order to do that you will need to implement ERP software to manage everything and there are two crucial things you must do in order to select the right software that is going to get you the best return on investment: conduct a business process assessment and choose your ERP system.
Conducting a Business Process Assessment
As we mentioned before, growing comes with growing pains. As production demand increases old processes start to show cracks and weakness. It is important to conduct a <>business process assessment (BPA) before you embark on any software selection project. A BPA is a top to bottom audit of every department’s day to day operation, so its important to include end users in this process to get a real world look at how your employees are actually performing their duties. Once that happens you can more easily identify which processes you want to carry over, which process aren’t running as efficiently as you need them to and you can begin to model how you want your processes to change.
In addition to understanding exactly how your current processes are working, including end users in the process gives them a sense of ownership in the project, meaning buy-in will be much easier to achieve when you do eventually select a new software system.
Picking Your Manufacturing ERP System
One of the biggest mistakes that companies make when selecting software is to try to heavily customize their software to their business process assessment rather than pick a software that is already the best fit for their unique needs. That’s an important distinction to make. The fact is that no ERP software is going to be a perfect fit for your unique needs straight out of the box. There will always be a need for some ERP customization in order to match the software to your business process model.
Where companies tend to get themselves into trouble is when the software they choose requires excessive customization in order to get anywhere near their ideal. Not only will this cause most projects to get way over budget, but implementation times will run long, and getting the software to work the way a company envisioned it can be near impossible to accomplish.
If you understand the importance of business process modeling and center your software search around your business process assessment you can scale accordingly, achieve a positive ROI and improve profits. For more help on understanding the software selection process you can contact The Attivo Group at 877-428-8486 or you can contact us here.
EBook: Why is a Business Process Assessment important?
A Business Process Assessment, or BPA, walks a company through understanding all the current processes and possible issues from every department, and put the findings in a workable document. This document includes suggested process improvement opportunities and prioritizes the improvements so a cohesive plan can be put into place in making effective changes. With such a plan and understanding of your company, upgrading an ERP system is simpler.
At The Attivo Group, we believe the only way to start an ERP implementation is first conducting a Business Process Assessment. We feel so strongly about it that we’ve built it right into our implementation process, with little to no added cost.
To find out more about Business Process Assessments, please download our eBook “It’s Not a People Problem, It’s the Process”. This 22 page e-book takes a look at a specific case study, analyzing the “as is” processes of a manufacturing company, walking you through the inefficiencies as well as outlining real world solutions to improve the bottom line.
