Just went live with your new ERP system. Now what?
Congratulations! After several months of hard work, you went live with your new ERP system. You finished your cut over to production, turned the new system on, and let the business users in. You are eager to declare victory, yet it is too early to announce a mission accomplished. Be prepared to handle what comes to you next.
Most project teams are happily surprised to see how quiet the first week can be post-go-live. If you did a decent job with your testing, transactions would flow through the system as planned. You may see some data migration-related issues hit your first. Note that business users initially interact with the data you have migrated rather than the data they have created using the new system. If there were issues with the migrated data, the transactions would flag errors or get stuck in the system. You need to make sure they are cleared out first.
The second wave is likely to hit you next. Those tend to be the corner cases you have not accounted for during your testing. It would be impossible to cover all scenarios prior to go-live. As business creates new master and transactional data in the new system, these corner cases start to show up as they represent unique intersections of business data and processes. These should be openly acknowledged prior to go-live and handled as they come up.
A third wave may hit you next while you are battling the first two. These tend to be wrongly executed transactions due to a lack of training or user error. I think these are the most dangerous ones as they start snowballing through the rest of the organization. Most companies underestimate how integrated an ERP system can be. A seemingly minor error in a remote operation may cause a large rework in another part of the system. Imagine a case where the merchandising people forgot to associate the cost for a new product. Warehouse personnel received it at zero cost, and you were about to ship it to a customer. You now must execute several financial transactions to fix this error. Such rework can consume a lot of time and effort. You need to catch these quickly and fix them once for all.
During the few weeks post-go-live, the key to your success lies with the speed of resolution. As these problems pile upon you, you must quickly resolve them. The speed of issue resolution should be faster than the speed of issue creation. This may require you to have your consultants around a bit longer - which is also the hyper-care period. For you to take control of the situation, the trend should come down. Declaration of victory is more suitable after you successfully close the first fiscal period in the new system. Until then, just keep a positive attitude and crush those issues.
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My name is Cem and this has been another gem.
