Establishing the right scope for an ERP implementation is critical for success. The following video of Illumiti VP of Consulting, Steve Thomas, discusses key factors to establish the right scope for your project success.
In ERP implementations, there always been an emphasis on scope management. I'm sure all of you heard constantly about minimizing scope creep, minimizing change requests, keeping true to the scope as you possibly can. Fundamentally, there's a more significant problem - how to establish the right scope at the outset of a project?
At Illumiti, we believe the real key to implementation success is establishing the right scope for a project before you start, which means understanding which elements of a solution could present significant risk. For example, an implementation where you want to implement core functionality into advanced transportation management functionality. If that transportation management functionality isn't absolutely critical to your competitive advantage and your positioning in the marketplace, it's highly dependent on your core logistics on the basic foundational parts of your ERP solution. Any change in the foundational design is going to impact that transportation design.
At Illumiti, we work very closely with you to understand which of these advanced capabilities are really intrinsic to meeting your business case in the outset and helping you understand which ones can be implemented at a later phase and reduce all the moving parts involved with the implementation. To do this, we use a concept called Core vs Context to identify business processes, a model proposed by Jeffrey Moore. The whole idea is that core processes are those that fundamentally differentiate you in the marketplace, where as the context are those that you must execute but don't differentiate you from competition. Our belief is that your focus should really be on those core elements. You should do a really good job of those core elements and then later additional elements of your business case or those that are less critical to success as an enterprise can be added on a subsequent phases at a much lower risk and with much less impact on the overall organization.
