ERP implementation: steps, best practices & market trends

The next step of an ERP implementation project is to assess your ongoing business processes and workflows and identify operational inefficiencies that the ERP solution needs to address. The ERP project team should audit your existing IT environment that includes all your corporate hardware, software, and network systems that support your business functions. Such analysis will help you formulate your needs and requirements for the new ERP solution and outline the required integrations.

As soon as you have designed your future ERP solution and selected the optimal ERP technology, you should decide on the implementation strategy to follow and detail all ERP development/customization activities, breaking up the entire process into tasks and carefully evaluating the amount of time required to accomplish each one.

At this stage, you should also create a step-by-step data migration roadmap for transferring your corporate data to the new system. Additionally, you have to create a solid change management plan to ensure smooth ERP adoption across the organization. A change management plan outlines the scope of change, including what processes will be automated, and which user-roles will access the ERP system, as well as defines communication channels, and training strategies to ensure your employees acquire the necessary ERP usage skills.

Depending on the type of the ERP solution, during this step, you should either configure and customize an off-the-shelf ERP system to your requirements or create the back- and the front-end of the custom ERP system. 

You also have to integrate the new ERP solution with your existing systems, including legacy and third-party applications, via pre-built connectors, custom APIs, or other integration solutions, to ensure that your data smoothly flows across your software ecosystem.

Data migration is a complex and time-consuming ERP implementation phase, as you can face the challenge of migrating large volumes of enterprise data, data quality issues, or incompatibility of data structures between your legacy system and new ERP solution. To ensure a smooth and successful migration, start by assessing data for inaccuracies and duplicates, cleanse your data before transferring it, and then carefully map it to the new ERP system.

Check your ERP software for functional, performance, security, usability, and compatibility issues. It is recommended to perform ERP software testing in parallel with ERP development and implementation, with new features delivered and tested and issues fixed in iterations, to identify and address defects early in the implementation process and reduce the amount of work required later.

Before the ERP launch, you should also perform user acceptance testing to ensure the system meets the needs and expectations of your employees.

When deploying your ERP software, either in the cloud or on-premises, be prepared to quickly resolve possible issues, like unexpected downtimes, configuration issues, data migration failures, or user access and permission problems.

After the ERP go-live, get your employees on board, assisting them all the way through, starting with personal ERP accounts set up. To make the adoption smooth, conduct role-based training for your end-users and provide guides and self-learning materials where they can find helpful information on using the ERP system.

Assemble an ERP support team that will be responsible for troubleshooting performance and security issues, onboarding new employees, and addressing user problems.

As your business evolves and your needs change, your ERP system will require updates or possible functionality extensions. Make sure your internal team will be able to address your evolving needs or entrust the ERP modernization to a reliable partner.