SAP Challenges for Small / Medium Businesses
An ERP system deployment is a challenge for any organization. For small-and-medium-size businesses (SMB), day-to-day operations must continue to operate while a significant shift in business processes and systems is being developed alongside them. The people running the business are more than likely the same ones designing, developing, testing and installing the new ERP application. Typically, the highest performing employees are assigned to these projects because of the depth and breadth of their knowledge and their work ethic. They cannot be pulled out of their current roles to spend months, or even years, to work on a new system. Instead, fast practical approaches are required to minimize disruption and yet define a clear path from the current environment to the new one.
Time, cost, quality, and business continuity are all important drivers for SMBs. By necessity SMBs tend to be leaner and more adaptive organizations because any other behavior can lead them to be left behind in the marketplace. This adaptability can be used as an advantage during an ERP project because company culture is more open to change and doing things differently – the argument that “it has always been done that way” is usually not an issue.
Consequently, SMBs tend not to be stuck in “analysis paralysis” and are focused on results, not process. Another advantage SMBs have is that they often have flat organizations, meaning the path from the C-suite to any other employee is short, making communications direct and unambiguous. These are all good things to have in place for a successful ERP project.
How DataXstream Helps
We are able to help SMBs with their pre-implementation assessments, project life cycle, and post-implementation activities because our consultants have broad and deep experience in SAP ERP projects. Our consultants have areas of expertise, but they also have comprehensive knowledge and hands-on experience in many aspects of an ERP deployment. Our consultants’ knowledge is not limited to a narrow area of focus, for example only understanding how accounts receivable works in SAP. Instead, our consultants understand how that process fits into the entirety of an order-to-cash process.
Out of necessity our consultants have broad and detailed experiences because we know an SMB cannot take on a small army of project team members with specialized skills and knowledge. You need team members who can contribute in many areas and are not constrained by artificial boundaries: your employees and our consultants complement each other to form a rapid delivery team.
DataXstream consultants are comfortable working with all levels of an organization (C-suite, director, manager, line manager, associates, etc.) and are able to both plan and manage workloads as well as deliver tangible work product themselves. Our consultants play multiple roles from initial project definition and scope; through design, development and testing; to go-live and post-implementation support.
DataXstream is the Right Choice
DataXstream worked with a multi-million dollar natural rubber and non-latex company, to determine the SAP ERP version best suited to their business. Over the course of a few weeks the company and DataXstream jointly developed a multi-year roll out plan encompassing a full range of business processes, multiple international locations, implementation sequence and approaches as well as a budget and resource requirements.
