Page 50 - MetalForming September 2015

Manufacturing ERP Experience
Apply Change Management to
Leap Over ERP-
Implementation
Hurdles
The road to successful ERP implementation includes placing the process before the technology, setting achievable goals and allowing employees to have ‘skin in the game.’
BY KEITH HELFRICH
It is a common saying that technol- ogy should work for humans and not the other way around. In a sim- ilar way, a company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is like a body’s central nervous system. When healthy, it provides the sensory input to management so that it can understand what is happening with customers, suppliers and employees. It helps man- agement respond by coordinating the company’s resources to win customers, battle competitors and reduce cost, just like muscles in a body.
But wait. The Internet is chock-full of horror stories regarding failures of ERP implementations. Issues plaguing ERP implementations are driven by
Keith Helfrich spearheads Growth GPS, a business-growth consulting company; www.growthgps.com. He also authors the Innovation Intersection column in MetalForming’s sister publication, Fab- ricating Product News.
the complexity, risk and integrated nature of the business processes they automate. ERP systems today touch almost every aspect of an organiza- tion, so whether it’s a completely new system, or just a major upgrade, there are a number of common pitfalls com- panies can avoid when implementing ERP.
There is No Cure-All
Companies unhappy with their cur- rent state become convinced that their efficiency or communication problems lie in the software, and that the grass will be greener on the other side of an expensive ERP project. That leads to the ready-fire-aim approach, which then leads to the most common pitfalls of
48 MetalForming/September 2015
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