Most of us know the story of the
hare and tortoise. The story concerns a
Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise and challenges the tortoise to
a race. The hare soon leaves the
tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway through the
course. When the Hare awakes however, he
finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before
him.
The account of a race between
unequal partners in which ingenuity and trickery are employed to overcome a
stronger opponent. The over ambitious
and overconfident, start and stop versus the steady consistent and persistent
effort. Haste makes waste and the race
is not to the swift. There are a number
of lessons in this story which apply to life in general as well as selecting
and implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution.
Thousands of businesses arrive
at a similar crossroads every year. As
it turns out timing really does play an important role. If you replace your existing solution too
early, you may end up with more software than you need. If you wait too long, you could end up
struggling with inefficient business processes that damage your business performance
and prospects for future profitability and growth.
At what point do the costs of
maintaining your existing system outweigh the benefits of keeping it in place? When is the right time to make the move? All businesses at one point or another will
struggle with the same issues. The
impact varies, but the challenges are similar.
Has your workforce growth
outpaced your infrastructure? Have you
added locations and mobile workers? Is
your information contained in multiple systems?
Do you have separate customer relationship management (CRM) system,
customer service processing, inventory control, warehouse management (WMS)? Are you overburdened by spreadsheet sprawl?
Is there a single dashboard where all information
is summarized with drill-down to the details?
How long does it take to get consolidated financial information?
What is the cost of inefficiency
to your organization?
How well are your customers
served? Do they get different information
from different sources? Are your
deliveries accurate? How much better
does your competition reach their customers (or your customers)?
How much guess work goes into forecasting? Customers expect you to have stock levels,
order status and delivery tracking at any time they contact you and they expect
it to be accurate. Sales people need to
have all the latest information on hand even when they’re out on the road when
they are in front of customers and prospects.
Does it take too long, how long
does it take, to share information and is it correct?
Where actually is that
inventory? Did you reorder what you
already have, because you could not find it?
Can your customers self serve their information needs? How much work goes into filtering and
analyzing your information into meaningful sales campaigns?
How many systems are you using
to deliver information?
Have you reached the limits of
your existing solution(s)? Have those
limits limited your ability to serve your customers and grow? Are you adding more people to your workforce
and still are not producing more? Do
your struggles drive the need to add more and more disconnected systems? Are your people resourceful and just want to
get their jobs done individually instead of raising the productivity of your
entire organization?
Do you dream of adding more
products or services, but dread the overhead of implementation in your current
solution? Not if, but how big are the
challenges to adapting to new business trends?
How much time and energy go into the technology of your business versus
working on your business? Do you have
budget for technology or are you fixing and patching?
What Return on Investment (ROI)
can you expect and how long will it take to get there, if you do invest in a
new solution? How will you bridge the
gap from where you are now and your vision of the future?
Well defined goals and a trusted
advisor can help to pave the way. Where
do you want to be in the future and when?
With an advisor you can document and map processes and match them to the
right ERP solution. While there may not
be an exact match, a good fit between challenge and resource will help to
define your processes and roadmap to solution implementation.
Compare the starting and
stopping, heading in wrong directions, not getting key functions working in a
timely manner causing cost overruns and failed implementations with what a
strong and steady tortoise-like approach can bring.
Are you a rabbit or
tortoise?
Which yields better
results?
Dolvin Consulting works
with your team to define a roadmap and develop a clearly defined project plan
for the future. We work with industry
experts to match challenge with solution.
We cannot guarantee you will fix all of your problems, but we do know
that an organization that selects a solution that integrates the entire
business process tends to yield great returns.
Why not contact us
today to see how we can help.
