Balmori Software Inc.

[ Article ]

You've pulled the trigger, spent the big bucks, installed the ERP software at your company.

Now you're looking forward to the fantastic benefits the vendor promised: Instantaneous business information at your fingertips. An always-synchronized, always-reliable database that allows your front liners to make confident, quick decisions.

A single source of truth in which all information is mutually consistent across the board - where the left hand always knows what the right hand is doing. A central nervous system that'll make your organization nimble, fast-moving, customer-centric.

Can all of this really come without any pain?

Not so fast.

As the cliché goes, the devil is in the details - the details of execution. Top management may understand the concept, but look to your rank and file. Seriously. Dangers abound even after you've installed the system and you've announced that adoption of the solution is a done deal.

It's all about certain behaviors among the hands-on users. You have to watch out that these behaviors don't undermine your computerization effort.

Elsewhere on this page, in easy-to-understand flowchart form, is our experience-based take on why enterprise software can end up being disappointing in day-to-day use. Again, it's all about certain behaviors of rank-and-file users.

The original sins described in the three topmost boxes look mighty venial at first. Therein lies their lethality. The inattentive manager may let these seemingly small transgressions slide at first; when their repercussions start blowing up, the sins won't look so venial after all.

Original Sin #1: Too few workstation licenses.

This is a simple situation. Are people at your company lining up for a chance to input their transactions? Waiting for co-workers elsewhere in the company to finish encoding transactions? So they can have their turn at inputting their data?

Are the Cebu or Davao teams always complaining that the Manila people are hogging network access, or vice versa? Or are the users on the 3d floor complaining about the users on the 5th floor?

Then you're trying to maintain your ERP with too few workstation licenses.

The solution is obvious.

And get this: if you're committing Original Sin #1, then for sure you're also committing Original Sin #2 below.

Original Sin #2: Not observing "time discipline" in inputting and encoding transactions.

Let's face it. Salesmen, purchasers, billing and collection people need real-time info to do their jobs with dispatch. In fact, all customer-facing staff need up-to-date info to do a decent job.

No, scratch that; even non-customer-facing staff need up-to-date info to do their jobs efficiently and swiftly.

If their data isn't up-to-date, they'll do what prudent people will do. They'll double-check their facts before executing a transaction. Lots of internal emails. Lots of inter-department and intra-department consultations.

For example, your inventory stock on hand report isn't up-to-date? Then your purchasing officer will spend time checking and verifying things before issuing a PO. He'd worry about over- or under-ordering otherwise. (Now picture in your mind how this impacts on work efficiency if your company deals in, say, 100 SKUs. Or 10,000 SKUs.)

Now, imagine all this cautious double-checking going on all over your organization. In sales, billing and collections, cashiering, warehousing. All this prudence and scrupulousness is commendable, of course. But it's also slowing you down.

But all this caution is down to one thing: the data in your ERP is not up-to-date. All this caution slows down your business's operating rhythm. And a slow-moving organization is a less competitive organization.

Inputting and posting transactions immediately as they happen is crucial in giving you real-time information. Which in turn leads to a clear view of the "business battlefield."

Losing this time discipline shatters any expectations of getting real-time info. Which degrades much of the usefulness of an ERP.

How do you break out of a slow operating rhythm? Make sure all data in your ERP are up-to-date. Give your people clarity. Give them confidence in the currentness of the information they rely on in the ERP. Remove the doubt.

And how do you achieve this? Simply put, knock heads together. Demand that everybody input transactions no later than 30 minutes after they happen in the physical world*.

Real-time information is not just a buzzword; it has down-to-earth value. Real-time information is actionable information. In contrast, poorly updated information guarantees that your people will defer action. And that slows down your operating rhythm.

Original Sin #3: Using separate, standalone software to output invoices, PO's, OR's, etc.

You say you already keep "most" of your company data in one ERP application. But in the next breath do you say you still use a separate standalone software to output transaction documents? (Spreadsheets and word processors definitely count as culprits here.)

Each incidence of data having to be encoded into a different software is a re-keying. And you want to minimize re-keyings, because re-keying gives rise to at least two avoidable problems:

Avoidable problem #1) Each data-encoding activity is one more opportunity to make inputting mistakes. Bad data in the database leads to bad decisions. And when you detect it, you'll still need to correct this bad data. That means expending more human resources and time on a task that shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. Result: more unproductive work, more operations slowdowns.

Avoidable problem #2) Each data encoding activity uses up employee energy and time. That's even if you had super-conscientious people at the keyboard incapable of inputting errors. Do you want to not waste employee energy and time? Then cut out that re-keying to begin with.

How do you cut out unnecessary re-keying? Make sure you use an integrated solution; this will minimize your people having to use multiple standalone apps. This in turn reduces re-keying. Do that, and you cut out these two avoidable problems.

Did you have a rosy vision of your ERP software being your company's central nervous system, empowering your every move with near-perfect clarity of information? Then you need to make sure you're innocent of these original sins. -rsr

More on what you need to watch out for - here. And here.

*Retail businesses already have a mature solution for this. Point-of-sale (POS) systems capture transactions as they happen. A well-designed ERP software solution will in turn accept data downloads from POS software, thus providing a seamless capture of data from the point of sale all the way to the main database.



Title:   Here's why your corporate computerization is stumbling





Share on

                                                                

<<< Back to top >>>