- November 7, 2016
- Posted by: Tom Ryan
- Category: Thought Leadership
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There are a lot of good reasons to change your enterprise systems. However, here are some common reasons that are NOT a good reason to change your ERP solution.
- It costs a fortune and anything that expensive must add tremendous value, right?
- We have zero investment in the existing ERP and the interfaces to surrounding applications and the new ones will have everything I need anyway, right?
- None of my master or historic data is in a new ERP so I get to convert it all from the old one except for history, possibly, of course.
- My employees have a high level of comfort with the existing systems so I get to disrupt everything everybody does on a day-to-day basis which will make us really inefficient for a while.
- We’ve had the existing system for a long time and haven’t applied updates for a long time and therefore it must be out of date and it can’t possibly contain the functionality we need.
- The failure rate of ERP implementation’s is very low and therefore the risk of implementing a new one is minimal.
- The underlying technology of the new ERP is the same as the old one so I won’t have to retrain my staff or hire any new IT folks.
- We are utilizing it completely and have exhausted all of the functionality available in our existing system.
- When we got a new ERP we can cut a bunch of costs, including headcount, and the new technology will be cheaper than the existing one.
- If it doesn’t work out it’s no big deal we can just go back to the old one.
Conclusion
Buried in these 10 reasons are serious considerations you should examine when contemplating a new ERP. Some of them are often genuinely good reasons for executing the replacement of the existing system. We recommend that before making such an impactful decision, you should develop a thorough business case which considers both realistic costs of and benefits from such a project. Indeed, the first step in our Six Steps to Success Methodology is focused on getting everyone across the organization bought into the business case for ERP replacement. Buy in and setting realistic expectations are critical component which will be your ally throughout the ERP journey. We also address the difficulties in producing a credible Total Cost of ownership for ERP in our report on the Challenges Cost Justifying ERP in F&B.
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For more information about using a consultant to help with software selection, see our previous post titled The Smart Software Selection Consulting Decision.