Over the past ten years businesses and organisations worldwide have enthusiastically invested billions of dollars in implementing ERP.

Although the need for business process change has been well recognised and ERP was heralded as the solution, the success of these implementations has been varied. Implementations are still considered, by the nervous and the brave, as incredibly disruptive, stressful. They often fail to deliver on the promise of business success.

In principle all ERPs are based on the same concept: by defining and automating our most important business practices, we will be able to work more efficiently, reduce overhead, increase agility, and improve insight into business drivers, large and small.

The bald fact remains that although ERP may be the right answer conceptually, by itself it’s not the solution. It doesn’t work.

Frustrating yet common shortcomings such as underperformance, low and incomplete adoption by staff, and poor implementation processes sabotage the intrinsic value of a solution which should change the performance of a business incrementally.

The true worth of any solution can not be achieved unless you have the perfect combination of a capable partner to implement the solution, a management team with the right attitude towards adopting the solution, and the right choice of ERP to begin with.

Without these three skittles lined up at once, any implementation is doomed to failure, or at best, will result in an inability to realise any meaningful return on the ERP investment.

That’s all fine in theory, but even when you have the right partner, the right product and a positive management perception, there is a fourth all-important and often ignored skittle: people.

We know that people are all important. Yet we fail to recognise, time and time again, that the primary strength of people is balanced by an equally important flaw: the basic human reluctance to accept change. And as we all know - the more complex the change, the greater the resistance to it.

Empowering individuals and therefore improving employee productivity is a far-from-new concept in the world of business. Millions have been made writing books on the subject, and seminars on the topic have built personal fortunes. Yet this endless acknowledgement and discussion of the issue hasn’t changed that basic resistance to change.

So if we can’t get people to change, then obviously technology must.

Recognition of this simple truth provides the opportunity to re-imagine how we can create a better, more productive fit between people and technology. And to change the technology to fit how people work, what they feel good about and what they will happily embrace.

With the innovations in hardware and wireless networks, advances in pattern recognition, smart content, visualisation, and simulation, we can now create software which melds to the way people work and supply what they need to do their jobs well.

This needs to spin out to each role within the company. The same set of tools for ERP users may be made available to all, but the individual will use select tools outside the ERP solution to enable them to fulfil their own role within the business. This could include communication tools such as email and fax, personal time management tools for scheduling and planning, instant messaging for discussions with co-workers, and personal productivity software to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

And there seems little reason why all those tools shouldn’t be available within the one system.

A perfect example of successfully combining productivity tools with a business improvement tool – and having a popular mass uptake by employees - is Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Not only are people working within an environment they recognise and are comfortable with, but they can fulfil their role more effectively and easily with this single seamless system.

According to Gartner: “Only those vendors that ‘redefine’ process beginning with the individual, combining process definition and tools that enable individuals to be flexible with the definition of their specific processes, will emerge as leaders in the ‘Process of Me’ category.”1

The future of ERP lies in the ability of the vendor to recognise that not only must their solutions continually develop to enable businesses to maximise their competitive advantages, they must also ensure their product is people-centric so it is used to its full potential.

Integration of all standard personal productivity software into a single seamless solution is a major step forward. The known and familiar sitting side-by-side with the overall business management tools can only increase confidence and uptake in usage.

It’s been predicted that there will be only four or five choices dominating ERP worldwide within the next ten years. This prediction I am sure will be debated, but beyond dispute is that the solution which fails to change to meet the needs of the user will not make it to that list.

In the end, ERPs don’t work. People do.

1. 2006 Gartner, Inc., “Person-to-Process Interaction Emerges as the ‘Process of Me,’” by Yvonne Genovese, Jeff Comport, and Simon Hayward.

For more information
Koorb Consulting
Tel: 09 361 1304
Web: www.koorb.co.nz

June 2007

By Nicholas Birch