Optimizing ERP in your organization.

• Author: Roque, Rob
• Position: Enterprise resource planning

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This article is the second in a series on what a jurisdiction needs to do in order to maximize its return on investment in an enterprise system. The first article in the series was "Making an Enterprise System Work for Your Organization," which ran in the June 2010 issue of Government Finance Review.

The process for optimizing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system focuses on major enhancements the existing application or activating additional functions within the system. The optimization process does not include regular maintenance activities such as adding a vendor, or adding a general ledger account, or applying minor system patches. Although these processes require a change control process, they typically do not require the process described below.

The stages for optimizing an ERP system are similar to the stages of selecting and installing an ERP application. The requirements stage is used to identify the business need, the detailed functional and technical requirements, the estimated costs, and the analysis of the solution. The implementation stage, which follows the same implementation steps as the original installation, is used to install the optimization. The post implementation phase is used to support the optimization.

REQUIREMENTS STAGE

Recommendations for system optimization usually go through a formal request process. However, it is inevitable that some requests for optimization will bypass this process--in the case of changes in laws and local ordinances, for instance. The origin of the request shouldn't matter. Highly integrated solutions require a thorough impact analysis before major changes are made to the application. Hastily installed changes will affect the functioning, performance, and scalability of the system. The following recommendations are designed to shorten the timeframe for completing the business impact process.

Ideally, a business analyst from the ERP support organization will be responsible for gathering the business requirements for the request. A thorough interview is conducted with the initial requester to validate the analyst's understanding of the issue and the requested improvement and associated processes. The analyst builds a list of business and technical requirements that follow the processes and then validates them with the requester. Associated workflow maps that are based upon the validated requirements may also be proposed by the analyst and validated by the requester. In some cases, the analyst may need to validate the requirements and workflows with teams of stakeholders.

The analyst works with the support organization to prepare a proposal to the requester. Just as the software vendors responded to the ERP request for proposal, the support organization responds to each optimization requirement using a standard set of definitions. The support organization also indicates the source of the solution (i.e., native software module or...