It's Kind of Like Brain Surgery
Upgrading an ERP system is a very big lift, and very high risk.
Challenge
In a manufacturing setting the ERP is the central nervous system, managing inventory and purchasing, driving MRP, tracking time on the shop floor, and serving AP and AR. The current ERP system was out of support, and therefore out of compliance with they company's regulatory requirements, as well as lacking modern capabilities needed in the evolving business environment. We needed to upgrade to a supported version without taking down the entire business.
Action
The business had hired an excellent technical implementation company to do the data migration and the actual install of the upgraded ERP. They discovered very quickly, however, that technical expertise with that particular system wasn't enough to support all of the concurrent activities that needed to happen. We assembled a cross-functional team and chartered a project. We performed an as-is/to-be assessment and we pulled together training materials for all of the functional areas that touched the ERP. To bring everything back into compliance, we completed a validation of the system to meet ISO 13485 and FDA regulatory requirements.
Result
We accomplished a completely validated ERP upgrade in 5 months with only one weekend of downtime. The only way this worked was to have someone with cross-functional experience on the internal team managing the external resources and mustering the support and committment of the relevant executives and directors to have their teams spend time on conference room pilots and participating in "train the trainer" activities.
